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Tag: acqusition

  • The DevOps Long Tail of Salesforce’s Slack Buy

    The DevOps Long Tail of Salesforce’s Slack Buy

    While most of the focus on the acquisition of Slack this week by Salesforce for $27.7 billion clearly revolves around digital business transformation initiatives, the implications of the deal for DevOps teams that have been employing Slack to collaborate for years is significant.

    Salesforce owns both Heroku and Force.com in addition to providing developers with a set of low-code Lightning tools for building applications on top of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications built by Salesforce.

    During a conference call with analysts this week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made it clear most of the initial focus will be on tightening integration between Slack and the company’s broad portfolio of customer relationship management, marketing, analytics and artificial intelligence software. However, Slack first gained traction as a collaboration service that DevOps teams employed to share updates and notifications. Many DevOps teams still employ Slack for that purpose and it’s only a matter of time before all the units that make up Salesforce tighten integration with Slack.

    It’s not clear to what degree that integration might convince DevOps teams to either stay with or switch to one of the several platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments that Salesforce makes available. However, the Lightning PaaS that Salesforce provides for organizations that want to extend the company’s SaaS applications has been gaining significant traction. Rather than writing entire applications from the ground up, the path of least digital business transformation resistance for many organizations is to employ low-code tools such as Lightning to extend existing SaaS applications.

    Salesforce also own MuleSoft, which it positions as a platform for integrating both SaaS and on-premises applications to further those digital business transformation initiatives.

    That approach has gained significant traction in the last six months as organizations have expanded reliance on SaaS applications to enable employees to more easily work from home to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. For its most recent third quarter, Salesforce posted revenues of $5.42 billion, an increase of 20% year-over-year. Benioff said the company is now lifting its future guidance to slightly exceed pre-pandemic levels. Salesforce is projecting fiscal 2021 revenue at the end of its fourth quarter will total $21.11 billion. Revenue guidance for fiscal 2022 has been raised to $25.5 billion.

    Most of the custom applications being built on top of Salesforce platforms are constructed by professional developers. That shift toward employing Salesforce SaaS applications as a platform has created demand for DevOps platforms from providers such as Copado and Gearset. Most recently, Gearset has begun offering free training to encourage the adoption of best DevOps practices among developers of applications based on the Salesforce platform.

    Benioff said the first fruits of the acquisition of Slack will manifest themselves next year. In the meantime, DevOps teams that have standardized on Slack for collaboration should expect to be hearing a lot more about Salesforce tools and platforms on a Slack channel near them.

    Of course, none of this is lost on Microsoft, which is similarly moving to incorporate Microsoft Teams within DevOps workflows. It will be up to each individual DevOps team to decide which approach to collaboration makes the most sense from here.

  • IBM Acquires Instana to Advance Observability Strategy

    IBM Acquires Instana to Advance Observability Strategy

    IBM this week announced it plans to acquire Instana, a provider of an application performance management (APM) platform that is optimized for microservices.

    Robin Hernandez, vice president of hybrid cloud management and AIOps for IBM, said Instana will plug an observability gap that has emerged in IBM’s portfolio as organizations start to build and deploy cloud-native applications more broadly.

    Previously, IBM provided APM capabilities via a Tivoli portfolio of tools that were optimized for core static Java applications, noted Hernandez. Instana will add an APM platform designed from the ground up to automatically instrument applications as they are being deployed by DevOps teams, he said.

    Istana also provides distributed tracing capabilities that the existing Tivoli portfolio lacks, Hernandez added.

    The data collected by the Instana agents injected into those microservices also will play a critical role in IBM’s overall approach to applying artificial intelligence to IT operations, also known as AIOps. The IBM approach to AIOps seeks to combine data from platforms such as Instana and Tivoli with third-party data sources such as ServiceNow to advance IT automation, he said.

    Available both as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and as software that can be deployed in an on-premises environment, Instana has gained traction as organizations have embraced observability as a core tenet of a set of best DevOps practices. Historically, IT teams only employed APM platforms to monitor their most mission-critical applications because of both the cost of the APM platform and the inherent difficulties involved in applying agents pervasively.

    Hernandez said observability takes monitoring to the next level because instead of simply tracking a known set of processes, platforms such as Instana make it possible to observe interactions in a way that discovers unknown relationships and dependencies between applications and infrastructure.

    IBM plans to primarily focus its Instana efforts on microservices-based applications. However, Instana can also be applied to observe existing legacy applications. IBM is still studying that use case as part of its ongoing due diligence, he noted.

    Massive amounts of capital have been pouring into observability startups that are trying to supplant legacy APM platforms as organizations transition to microservices. Providers of legacy APM platforms, meanwhile, are re-engineering their platforms to support microservices-based applications that are most often deployed on Kubernetes clusters. IBM is addressing that challenge via an acquisition that complements its renewed focus on hybrid cloud computing and AI, Hernandez said.

    It’s too early to say which vendors will triumph in the observability wars, but the one thing that is certain is there is no shortage of options. It’s not clear to what degree the shift to observability will result in the rolling up of a variety of tools to manage IT, but the days when IT tools simply monitored a process are starting to fade away.

  • BMC Software Closes Compuware Deal, Sets Course

    BMC Software Closes Compuware Deal, Sets Course

    BMC Software today announced it has formally completed its acquisition of Compuware as part of an expanded effort to modernize mainframe environments.

    Bill Miller, president of ZSolutions at BMC, said now that the deal has been closed the combined companies will be able to more tightly integrate Compuware’s Topaz application development and deployment platform with the BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence platform, as part of an Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) initiative based on ongoing investments BMC is making in AIOps.

    Chris O’Malley, CEO of Compuware, said that level of integration will, for example, make it easier to automate the deployment of database and provisioning of mainframe resources using tools from BMC within a set of DevOps processes optimized for mainframe environments.

    The goal is to make the mainframe just one more target platform on which DevOps teams can build and deploy applications faster, added O’Malley. That’s becoming a bigger requirement in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, as organizations prioritize digital business transformation initiatives that will inevitably require updates to mainframe applications.

    Rather than increasing technical debt by duplicating existing capabilities, O’Malley said more organizations will look to modernize mainframe applications to make them more accessible to a wide variety of front-end applications.

    The rate at which IT organizations that deploy applications on mainframes have been adopting DevOps has been uneven at best. Mainframe applications are often considered to be among the most mission-critical in the enterprise. Therefore, IT teams have relied on waterfall processes to build and deploy mainframe applications in a more deliberate fashion.

    At the same time, however, the use of Linux on mainframes has increased considerably in the last several years. The applications deployed on Linux operating systems on the mainframe frequently employ the same DevOps processes to deploy applications on Linux running on distributed computing systems.

    BMC’s ambitions, of course, far exceed the mainframe. The company has a portfolio of tools for managing both distributed computing and mainframe platforms. During the economic downturn, BMC is betting many IT teams will be under increased pressure to reduce the total cost of IT by centralizing the management of mainframes and distributed computing systems, among other moves.

    Of course, BMC is not the only IT vendor with similar ambitions. IBM and Broadcom, which acquired CA Technologies, are moving down a similar path. IT organizations will need to determine which providers enable them to best streamline management processes.

    In the meantime, it remains to be seen how much organizations remain committed to the mainframe. It’s generally not feasible for most organizations to move a transaction processing application running on zOS into the cloud. However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that those IT organizations will continue to invest in building and deploying new applications on mainframes instead of making them more accessible via application programming interfaces (APIs).

    Regardless of the strategy adopted, however, it is not likely that after being around for more than 50 years, mainframes will be disappearing anytime soon.

  • DevOps Deeper Dive: DevOps Consolidation This Way Comes

    DevOps Deeper Dive: DevOps Consolidation This Way Comes

    The merger of XebiaLabs and CollabNet VersionOne announced this week will accelerate the ongoing consolidation of providers of DevOps platforms that has been slowly gaining momentum for the better part of two years.

    Under the terms of the agreement, the unnamed combined company will be led by Ashok Reddy, formerly with Broadcom, CA Technologies and IBM. Current XebiaLabs CEO Derek Langone will become president of the combined company. Current CollabNet VersionOne CEO Flint Brenton is stepping down from the combined company.

    CollabNet has been trying to make a case for employing value stream management tools to better align application development projects with business objectives ever since it merged with VersionOne, a provider of an application lifecycle management (ALM) platform anchored around version control software, in 2017. Late last year, CollabNet VersionOne was acquired by TPG Capital, which pledged to make $500 million in funding available to drive organic and inorganic growth. The decision to appoint Reddy as CEO of the combined company was made by TPG.

    XebiaLabs, meanwhile, raised $100 million capital in early 2018 to drive investments in building a continuous delivery platform. The goal now is to more tightly integrate the respective platforms of the two companies to advance value stream management with Global 5,000 class organizations, says Langone.

    “There is no enterprise-class player in this space,” said Langone.

    Rival offerings either don’t scale to meet the needs of larger enterprises or they are simply too shallow to meet business requirements, he noted.

    Of course, value stream management is where most of the rivals of the combined entity are also focused. CloudBees, for example, has already rolled out value stream management modules as an extension of its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform. CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey said the company is now taking that concept to the next level by building a software delivery management (SDM) platform that normalizes data from multiple data sources. The open source Jenkins CI/CD platform, along with the Electric Cloud application release platform CloudBees gained via acquisition last year, would be one of many data sources for that platform, he said, while value stream management would be one of several applications available to different classes of users within that SDM platform.

    While mergers and acquisitions among DevOps vendors have been occurring slowly, Labourey said he expects the pace of such deals to increase in the months ahead as organizations embrace more complex modern application architectures based on microservices.

    “The destination is now clear,” he said.

    GitLab, meanwhile, has already signaled in 2020 that it will be adding value stream management capabilities to its namesake platform. Rather than trying to merge disparate code bases acquired by acquisitions, GitLab is building an end-to-end platform on a common code base, says Jackie Meshell, a senior product manager for GitLab.

    “We’re seeing the market follow that fast,” Meshell said.

    There are, of course, other approaches to value stream management applications that span multiple application development platforms, including offerings from Plutora, Tasktop and Panaya.

    Value stream management has become an industry buzzword of late as more organizations appreciate the degree to which their businesses now revolve around the rate at which software gets built and delivered. Value stream management applications are roughly the equivalent of business intelligence software for business managers, who pull metrics and data from application development platforms to determine whether projects are falling behind and what impact those delays might have on the business.

    Most business leaders are going to lean toward value stream management applications that can be applied across multiple application development platforms, said Bob Davis, chief marketing officer for Plutora. Few organizations are standardized on a single application development platform, he noted.

    While it’s still early days in terms of adopting value stream management applications, Davis said it’s already apparent that in the age of digital business transformation the category is red hot.

    “Value stream management these days is everywhere,” he said.

    It remains to be seen whether a strategy that focuses mainly on slower-moving enterprise IT organizations will succeed at a time when more agile startups continue to gain share at the expense of larger incumbents in almost every industry. Many of those enterprise IT organizations may get exposed to value stream management by acquiring a rival that has already adopted an application. Of course, it’s also just as likely that by the time many of those enterprise organizations reach the point where they need value stream management applications, it may be past the point where they remain relevant.

    Regardless of how they get there, however, wider adoption of value stream management as an extension of SDM is coming. The only unknown now is how and when.

    — Mike Vizard