Automic, the leader in Business Automation, today announced major new capabilities within its product and services offerings for Application Release Automation. These new capabilities include a practical blueprint that enterprises can use to determine their roadmap to continuous delivery, as well as new pipeline visualization tools, open-source community driven content, Marketplace integration, online maturity assessments and a unique multi-tenant cloud sandbox for prospects to try before buying.

With today’s announcements Automic provides enterprises, across all industries and geographies, with the necessary capabilities such as agility, scalability, reliability and speed to drive competitive advantage, respond to customer needs and ensure customer loyalty in this digital age.

A practical blueprint approach to continuous delivery.

Digital transformation is a key imperative for all companies. However, many enterprises are weighed down with complex IT systems that have been built over the years and represent significant investment. The result is that IT is in danger of being pulled apart as digital front-office teams innovate quickly with a wide range of open-source tooling. This leads to tool chain sprawl and disparate islands of automation, while the back-office applications continue with slow yet reliable version rollouts. However, these systems are always connected – for example, new customer facing digital apps will demand updates or changes to the core back-end business logic and data.  The key requirement is to link these approaches by adding agility and speed to traditional application delivery, and reliability, compliance and scale to the innovative digital applications.

“We are simplifying how our customers execute on their DevOps journey by specifically targeting all of the applications across an enterprise with the goal of driving the digital transformation required by our clients”, said Chris Boorman, Chief Marketing Officer, Automic. “Our experience in Automation, expertise in production IT environments, and industry recognized technology are key differentiators that position us and our clients for success. The Automic Blueprint for Continuous Delivery provides a practical approach that an enterprise can employ to scale continuous delivery across both back-office applications and the new digital front-office.  This blueprint provides a clear and structured approach for all enterprises to use in driving their digital transformation”.

Simplifying adoption and user experience. 

Enterprises today demand rapid time to value and this requires software that is simple to try, quick to deploy and easy to manage. The updates outlined below illustrate the key ways in which Automic Release Automation makes the digital transformation to Continuous Delivery consumable - not just for the early adopters but for all enterprises. 

New features include:

• A Cloud based sandbox.

Automic’s “Try it before you buy it” service, on the Automic multi-tenant cloud based sandbox – the first of its kind in the ARA market. 

• Visualization of the delivery pipeline of all applications. 

Simplifying the planning, management and execution of deployment and release activities of multiple teams and applications across the entire organization is made possible with the new pipeline visualization dashboard plugin within Automic Release Automation.  Immediately Dev and Ops can visualize their entire deployment pipeline to better understand the impact and time implications of multiple concurrent releases throughout the organization. 

• Deployment to public or private clouds from a multi-tenant platform.  

First in the industry, Automic Release Automation enables enterprises and service providers to serve multiple departments and clients in isolation from each other on a single shared platform, scaling for extremely large environments while driving cost of ownership down, simplifying operations and maintenance.  

• Integration with the Automic marketplace allowing developers to contribute and use new content seamlessly.

Developers and Operations teams can harness the wealth of knowledge in the Automic Marketplace - an App Store for automation development.  Community members can enhance or re-use this content seamlessly. To make creating new plugins as simple as possible, users now have access to the new Action Builder plugin inside the product that lets them build and package their own custom scripts, which can be seamlessly shared on the marketplace as well. In addition, a new Plugin Manager enables users to simply deploy plugins directly from the marketplace. Unlike other vendors that lock enterprises into proprietary development styles and narrow toolsets, the Automic approach empowers developers to leverage whatever tools they prefer to use and drop their new components directly into their continuous delivery pipeline. 

• A unique DevOps maturity assessment service.

Enterprises are at varying levels of sophistication in their journey to digital transformation. Automic today is providing a new online assessment service that will benchmark an enterprise against key dimensions of maturity – relating to Culture & Strategy; Automation capabilities; Structure & Processes; and Collaboration & Sharing. By answering a set of simple questions, enterprises can benchmark themselves against the Automic standard, against their peers, their industry or their region.

Pricing & Availability:

Automic Release Automation is available for general shipment.  All plugins are immediately available on the Automic Marketplace. The DevOps assessment is available here http://automic.com/resource/devops-maturity-assessment-tool. Pricing is available on-demand.