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Tag: alm

  • Anaxi Adds Reporting Capabilities to ALM Tool

    Anaxi Adds Reporting Capabilities to ALM Tool

    Anaxi today announced it has added reporting capabilities to its namesake application lifecycle management (ALM) tool that make it possible to update stakeholders about the status of software development projects residing in repositories such as GitHub and Bitbucket Cloud as well as project management applications such as Jira.

    Company CEO Marc Verstaen said reporting capabilities will make it easier to employ Anaxi to, for example, keep business leaders apprised of updates to software development initiatives by enabling IT leaders to generate a report similar to how business leaders today employ a business intelligence (BI) application to share sales forecasts.

    The Anaxi tool is designed to provide IT leaders with a single tool for tracking progress being made across multiple DevOps platforms. Verstaen said as more organizations begin to realize they are really software companies, interest in software delivery management tools is on the rise. The reporting challenge IT leaders face is the information they need to create a holistic report lies in multiple repositories because of the inherently fragmented nature of the DevOps tool chain, he said.

    To make it easier to adopt Anaxi, the ALM tool Data employs the same credentials organizations have created to access GitHub, Bitbucket and Jira. The Anaxi app connects directly to a user’s GitHub or Bitbucket repositories and Jira projects to ensure data privacy and security. Any action performed on the Anaxi applications is written back on GitHub, Bitbucket and Jira to maintain consistency across projects involving multiple team members.

    At its core, Anaxi is pulling metadata from DevOps tools to apply analytics to track individual developer productivity and team performance. IT leaders can, for example, analyze how much code has been added and removed, refactoring and code churn on a weekly basis. Anaxi can be used either in place of a project management application or as a complement to an existing project management tool to make analytics more accessible.

    The primary goal is to make it easier for IT leaders to identify DevOps bottlenecks and prioritize projects in a way that advances business goals. Too many organizations are writing more code than ever only to discover projects are being held up because a single component on which every other module depends is behind schedule. Many of the developers writing that code could have been working on other projects if IT leaders had been made aware of changes that needed to be made to the schedule based on the anticipated delay to another project. Anaxi essentially applies predictive analytics to software development projects to determine based on past histories the likelihood of a deadline being met, Verstaen said.

    Armed with that intelligence, IT leaders can either proactively reallocate how resources or allocated or inform business stakeholders to changes in delivery schedules. In either case, Versaten says the goal is to enable IT leaders to avert any software development crisis that might arise.

    The Anaxi app is free to use by teams of up to 10 members. Teams of more than 10 users will be required to adopt a premium plan priced at $19 per month per user.

    — Mike Vizard

  • CollabNet Merges with VersionOne for ALM Supremacy

    CollabNet Merges with VersionOne for ALM Supremacy

    Thanks to the rise of DevOps, there has been a lot of focus on various forms of application lifecycle management (ALM) spanning multiple application development methodologies. But as IT organizations become more comfortable with multiple methodologies, it turns out they are not replacing one with another as much as simply trying to figure out where to employ one over another. That, in turn, is driving some consolidation across the ALM category.

    CollabNet this week announced it is merging with VersionOne, a provider of an ALM framework optimized for agile application development. While CollabNet has made some forays into the space, historically its primary focus has been on waterfall methodologies commonly used across larger enterprise IT organizations. CollabNet CEO Flint Brenton says the goal now is to combine the best of the ALM tools provided by both companies to enable IT organizations to leverage agile and waterfall methodologies as they best see fit. In fact, he says the biggest ALM issue facing organizations today is the need to balance developing applications faster and the inherent risks associated with potentially moving too quickly.

    Robert Holler, formerly the CEO of VersionOne, will assume the post of chief strategy officer for the combined company. He says there’s very little overlap between the two company’s product portfolios, and the one thing that will distinguish CollabNet going forward is an open approach to ALM that enables organizations to employ whatever tools they prefer. Instead of forcing organizations to rip and replace those tools, Holler says ALM frameworks need to foster collaboration rather than trying to impose a closed ALM environment. That environment also needs to be deployable on-premises or in the cloud, depending on the requirements of the customer.

    Holler notes that once any segment of the IT industry reaches a certain level of maturity, consolidation is all but inevitable. The opportunity CollabNet has is providing an ALM environment that makes it possible to automatically package and deploy applications that includes strong version-control mechanisms. Those capabilities will become even more critically important as IT organizations expand usage of microservices based on, for example Kubernetes, alongside traditional virtual machine deployments across the enterprise. Accomplishing that goal will require a common management layer capable of spanning both environments, he says.

    The combined companies have more than 20,000 customers. That number may not collectively represent the lion’s share of the ALM market, but it does make CollabNet a serious contender against a host of rivals that are both a lot older and larger. CollabNet’s challenge now is convincing customers of competitive organizations to switch to an ALM platform that CollabNet contends is a whole lot more flexible.

    In the meantime, it’ll be interesting to wait and see if the combination of CollabNet and VersionOne will drive any additional acquisitions at a time when IT organizations are becoming a lot less religious about what type of application development methodology gets employed by who and when.

    — Mike Vizard

  • DevOps Chat: Software Lifecycle Management with Michael Azoff, Ovum

    DevOps Chat: Software Lifecycle Management with Michael Azoff, Ovum

    I had a chance to sit down with Michael Azoff, principal analyst for Ovum. Ovum just released a set of matrices that Michael was the author of on ALM, DevOps release management and one on Agile project management. Taken together they provide some great insight into the entire software lifecycle management space.

    I had a chance to view the reports before speaking with Michael and you can too courtesy of IBM. Here are the links:

    1. Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a DevOps Release Management Solution, 2016-17
    2. Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting an Application Lifecycle Management Solution, 2016-17
    3. Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting an Agile Project Management Solution, 2016-17

    Here is my conversation with Michael. Below is a transcript so you can follow along if you like as well.

    Here is the transcript of our conversation:

    Alan Shimel:                Hi, this is Alan Shimel of devopsy.kinsta.cloud.  Very happy to be joined today by Michael Azoff, principal analyst at Ovum.  Michael, welcome to DevOps Chats.

    Michael Azoff:             Thank you very much, Alan.  Pleased to be here.

    Alan Shimel:                Thank you.  Michael, you – well, Ovum, but you as the author, just published several Ovum decision matrices – I guess plural of “matrix” – in the last day or two, one of which was on DevOps, Agile, et cetera.  For our audience who may not be familiar with the Ovum decision matrix, can you explain kind of what they are, who the audience is, what they’re about?

    Michael Azoff:             Sure.  Yeah, absolutely.  So the Ovum decision matrix is Ovum’s product comparison methodology, where we compare products side by side, across three dimensions – one is the technology; the other is enterprise fit; and then we use the matrixes – the result is displayed as a bubble chart, so the size of the bubble is the marketing, so those are the three dimensions.  And I cover the software lifecycle management at Ovum, and we published three Ovum decision matrices covering the whole life cycle, so one was on application lifecycle management, one was on Agile project management, and the other, DevOps release management.

    Alan Shimel:                Fantastic –

    Michael Azoff:             The ALM – sorry, do you wanna ask a question?

    Alan Shimel:                No, no, I said that’s fantastic.

    Michael Azoff:             Yeah.  It’s not common for us to – for one analyst to do three at the same time – I think I’m the first to do that – but it made logical sense because I’m covering the lifecycle from end to end.  The ALM one we’ve been – we’ve had a cycle of these decision matrices for many years, but this is the first one that spans not just enterprise IT but also engineering manufacturing, where, because of the exponential rise of software content in advanced products, there is a very, very clear need for managing that complexity and a role for ALM.  So this covered, for the first time, the engineering side as well.

    The Agile project management was then a subset of the ALM one and focused purely on enterprise IT, so that’s the original scope for ALM.  Calling it “Agile project management” because it’s very much about the management at a high level, and then using – typically, organizations use a lot of open source tools for code development, so that made logical sense to name it in that fashion, with Agile being now so typical and common, but many of these solutions are generic and allow any kind of process to, from traditional stage-gates through to Agile, allow that coverage.

    And then DevOps release management, which has been around for some time – I think the first report where we looked at products was in 2010, but, this year, we’re seeing the topic has become really, really hot, and it was timely to do an Ovum decision matrix – in fact, the first proper decision matrix on solutions in that sphere.

    Alan Shimel:                Got it.  Let’s talk about some of the companies and what – well, before we do that, Michael, can you give our listeners a little insight into how this was conducted?

    Michael Azoff:             Sure.  So the original matrix terminology, I think, stemmed from the fact that we send the vendors – we invite vendors to participate.  We send them project criteria.  If they fit the criteria, then they’re in.  It’s, essentially, we’re looking at the top players in the market.  I also tend to invite some of the more interesting and innovative smaller companies to participate as well because I think that that’s of interest to the readers.  But, generally, it is the top market leaders who are participants.  So we send them a spreadsheet and that’s their sort of matrix.  It’s – has the 200 to 400, which we’re actually trying to reduce the number of questions, rows, that we have in the matrix, but the vendors fill these out.  We then have a briefing with the vendors.  We have a demo of their product, and we also delve into their marketing approach and we look at their financial numbers.  We look at their approach to customer service.  So it’s very in depth, it’s multi-dimensional, as I mentioned, and, on that basis, we then produce the decision matrix bubble chart.

    Alan Shimel:                Got it.  I don’t know if we wanna name names, Michael, but let’s take the DevOps matrix, to start with.  What were – who – according to the matrix, what were some of the let’s call it “top performers” – is that a good term to use?

    Michael Azoff:             Yeah, it certainly is.  And I think of all the – I’ve been an analyst since 2003 and conducted these type of vendor product comparisons, and I would say this has been the most contentious and the most difficult to, of all of these exercises, in drawing vendors apart.  So I ended up with quite a number of leaders who looked very sort of in that leading category.  Oh, I can – I’ll try and do this alphabetically, so, let’s see, so CA, CloudBees, Automic, Clarive, Microsoft Electric Cloud, IBM, Serena – did I mention CA? –  XebiaLabs, so, yeah.

    Alan Shimel:                Sounds pretty comprehensive.

    Michael Azoff:             [Chuckles] There’re a lot of vendors.  They all did extraordinarily well.  It was very difficult to draw them apart, but they all have rather different approaches to the market, and this is what is sort of delved into in the actual ODM report, so I do encourage people to actually look at the report and read carefully as what – so that’s a strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis, which goes into quite a lot of detail and really gives the flavor of each of these solutions, in that leading category.  And then we have some challenger solutions as well, yeah.

    Alan Shimel:                Got it.  And, Michael, I mean, certainly DevOps is on top of everyone’s list of hot topics or near the top of everyone’s list of hot topics.  You know, separating the hype from the reality here, just where’s the ceiling for these things?  I mean, do you see – what do you see down the road in short term – 12 months, 18 months, 24 months?

    Michael Azoff:             Well, we had the first wave of the innovation in this market with support for managing continuous delivery, so, at an open source level, there was activity.  There were vendor startups that provided their own continuous delivery solutions and then, on top of that, management and orchestration.  So all of that was happening around 2011, and the larger vendors made acquisitions.  I mean, IBM acquired UrbanCode; CA acquired Nolio; BMC, StreamStep.  So very much a sort of rationalization and an anticipation of the market.  But we’re still seeing new players come onto the scene, like Clarive, for example, is an interesting one and CloudBees, the open source project – owners of Jenkins have sort of stepped into the enterprise side and expanded their offering with an enterprise-ready release management solution – so still a lot of activity.  And I would say the next step in this market would be ALM and release management tying a lot closer, and I think, from a customer point of view, it would be a useful benefit to have a single ALM solution that included these advanced release management technology in there as well.

    Alan Shimel:                Yeah.  Absolutely.  Michael, where do you see – now one of the questions I always get is, with all due respect, right, these analysts do great reports, but they’re behind firewalls, they’re behind reg-walls.  One of the nice things about these Ovum matrices is I see IBM and some of the other vendors are making the matrices themselves available if you’re willing to fill out their registration form, and what I like about that is it gets this intelligence into the hands of people, whether you wanna take it slanted or whatever because you had to fill out a registration form – that’s up to you – but for people, Michael, who are saying, “How independent – how much stock do we put in these things?”  You’ve already given us a little background into the methodology behind the research, the wide spectrum of companies you’re covering, but talk about independence of Ovum and of your research here, so – I want people to understand that.

    Michael Azoff:             Yeah, absolutely.  So, as analysts, our credibility is our independence, so we’re not aligned with any vendor.  As an analyst firm, we face both ways – we do work for vendors, we work also with end-user customers, and we also provider solutions for vendors and for enterprise customers.  So we face both ways – we work with all parties – but our independence is our credibility in the market, so we take a completely objective view of the responses from the vendor.  And, sometimes, the vendors don’t like what they see, but they actually find it very useful to get a completely unjaundiced and independent view because it helps them understand exactly where they are in the market.

    I think the ALM one, in particular, was a bit of a shock for a number of vendors because of our re-scoping of how we look at ALM.  Some vendors completely ignore the engineering market, and we see that as one of the growth areas in ALM, so I think that caught out a number of vendors by surprise, despite the fact that we’ve been telling them they ought to look at that part of the market, for ALM.

    Alan Shimel:                Absolutely.  Michael, can you give our readers what’s next?  What other matrices related to these subjects or other kind of research might you guys be working on next?

    Michael Azoff:             Sure, sure.  So, personally, so my brief is the software development lifecycle management, and I cycle through three areas – ALM, mobile development platforms, and application performance management – despite the fact that the ALM one was a triplet, but it is, logically, the lifecycle, if you like.  So the next one in the cycle will be Q4 this year, and that’ll be on application performance management.

    Alan Shimel:                Great.  All right.  Michael, we’re just about out of time, unfortunately.  I apologize; maybe we can talk again another time.  It was great chatting with you and I hope our readers have learned something here that can help them.  And thank you for all the research you do – can never have enough information on this stuff.  Micheal Azoff, principal analyst at Ovum, thank you very much.

    Michael Azoff:             Thanks, Alan, for inviting me.

    Alan Shimel:                Thank you, and this is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud.

  • Visualizing and defining requirements comes to DevOps

    Visualizing and defining requirements comes to DevOps

    We have all seen the nice circular diagrams of a DevOps methodology for application lifecycle management (ALM) like the one above. We interject some automation, make the two halves work closer together, get some feedback loops going and go as fast as we can. But lets look at those first two steps in the diagram, the ones labeled consult and design. What and how do we accomplish this? There is a company called iRise that has built a great business by allowing for rapidly visualizing and defining requirements for building applications. It is high time we recognize this as the important piece of the puzzle that it is.

    I recently had a chance to meet with some of the executive team of iRise while I was in London for the CD Summit.  The premise of iRise is so simple I was thinking to myself, “why hasn’t anyone else thought of this?”  If the old adage of crap in is crap out is true, why wouldn’t we take the time to define and plan our software better early on? I know everyone thinks they do, but do they really? Do we quickly visualize to help define the requirements and to help the team buy in and sign off? If it is set up right to begin with, it flows a lot faster later.

    Now the folks at Tasktop creators of the Eclipse Mylyn open source tool have teamed with iRise to OEM iRise into the Tasktop Software Lifecycle Integration system. In speaking with Stephen Brickley, EVP of iRise, he thinks this partnership will be a key factor in bringing iRise into the mainstream DevOps tools market.

    iRise’s customers, like software departments everywhere are adopting new ways of developing and operating software. New times and new ways don’t mean that you throw out what works though. To me it is a no brainer. If you have a tool that lets you quickly visualize, prototype and communicate to the rest of the team before investing a lot of effort into development, it really has to help.  It is the ultimate shift left.

    I guess the issue is how quickly can you do this without adding extra steps to the development process. From what I saw of iRise it makes it really easy and fast. Of course I would be interested to hear from anyone who has used iRise or even a similar tool on your own experience. But if it all is as it seems, I would expect iRise to be a welcome addition to the DevOps toolbox.

    What do you think? What tool do you use for this now or do you just skip this in planning and initial requirements? We are always on the lookout for new tools to report on at devopsy.kinsta.cloud, but ultimately we depend on our readers to tell us what is really useful or not.  So let us know.

  • Is ALM Dead in the World of DevOps?

    Is ALM Dead in the World of DevOps?

    Has DevOps killed Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)? If the question makes you dizzy, you’re probably not alone; after all, it seems like just a few years ago that ALM was a fresh, new idea — and a key component of most implementations of Agile. So what happened to ALM, and why would DevOps kill it (if that’s what actually happened)? First, a little history:

    (more…)

  • Cloud or In-house with Chris Kinsman, Part 2

    Cloud or In-house with Chris Kinsman, Part 2

    I sat down last week with Chris Kinsman, Chief Architect at PushSpring and a 20+ year veteran of software development, to talk about the factors that go into deciding when to migrate to the cloud. In Part 2 of our conversation we talked about the resistance and arguments against moving to the cloud. Once again I’ll let Chris do most of the talking:

    “What I struggle with is those companies who are trying to decide whether they go to the cloud or not even attempt it. For someone starting out, I don’t think there’s any choice – unless there is one specific requirement that pushes you out of the cloud. Or, and this is a little different, they may be evaluating a new project in an existing company. If you’re an existing company that has in-house already – whether it’s co-location or your own data center and you’re already invested in servers and storage – then the default always seems to be continue as is.”

    Well, if the business has existing business with the in-house model, to the extent that they’re successful with that model they may be hesitant to impact that revenue stream.

    “Maybe or maybe not – it could be that you’re just selling a service and they don’t really care whether it’s your hardware or someone else’s. As an example, if you’re paying for a $50/month MailChimp subscription do you really care whose equipment it runs on? Because you’ve already bought into that whole idea of paying for a service and not really caring about what’s behind it. So if I already have in-house infrastructure, at what point do I transition to the cloud, and that might be a more gradual decision.

    One common justification for remaining in-house is avoiding any forced migration. While it’s true that the cloud can – and will! – upgrade your infrastructure, you can also use the cloud to run whatever you want to run.

    “As a consumer of a service bus, I don’t care if they’re running it on 2008 or 2012. As long as it provides the same service, I don’t care what they run under the covers and that’s the beauty of it. Because if I care, that means I have guys in my org who are worried about that that I’m paying to worry about that, and how to keep up with that schedule, and everything else.

    So let’s go back to machine instances. That’s where it’s now on me to maintain, care about migration. And that’s also a choice. There are services that allow me to run my service as service bus, i.e. if I’m running Azure websites, I’ve got a way to get deployed – I need to make sure that my code runs – but I shouldn’t care what server OS they’re running. So these machine instances, that’s the difference between Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service. A lot of folks gravitate towards IaaS because they give up LESS control – they haven’t totally abdicated. But the problem I’ve found is that while that’s an easy baby step to lift and step your infrastructure from your internal data center into the cloud, that’s not really taking advantage of the Cloud. That’s continuing to do the thing you’ve always done, just with a machine that’s somewhere else. And I would also argue that that’s not the way you’re going to realize cost savings by moving to the cloud – because you’re continuing to do things the same way you did them before.”

    So, what are the cases you’ve seen where someone should not be using the cloud?

    “This is controversial, but I can think of a few. Where technology is not their primary business. Where they are potentially in a declining market. Where they’re not rolling out new software, they’re not trying to gain new users. They’re just rolling something along to the end of its product cycle. They don’t need scalability – they just want the absolute lowest cost. They don’t even really care about the experience of the users. Then, absolutely find the lowest cost place to host your server. But when I look at people who are making their money off of software, who are trying to grow their customer base and get more users, it’s almost never the right decision.

    And that’s not just me saying that. I saw a stat the other day that 10 years ago, for an Internet startup 80% of their Series A money went to infrastructure. Today, if you tried to pitch a VC that 70-80 of their money would go to infrastructure they would never fund you. They fully expect that 70-80% of their investment will go to salaries for the individuals who are building the product.”

    How about a more mature operation already hosted in the cloud? Is there a point where, for cost or other reasons, it might make sense to move to an in-house model?

    “Even those middle stage startups, I’d say help me understand your case. Maybe their case is they’re doing real-time something and they’re very sensitive to latencies. But I’d say that even guys who are doing VOIP are starting to do more virtualization – and VOIP is about as latency-sensitive as you can get when you’re actively listening for any pauses. So what are those cases? Perhaps there are some out there, but I haven’t encountered them.

    Take telemetry, if you’re a company going out with an Internet of Things story – you’re the next FitBit, or a wearable, or put data collection of your car in the cloud – all of those business models are built on the cloud.”

    Well, you used to work for casinos. They have massive data, real-time needs, and obviously super-tight security. What about them?

    “There I can see a lot of resistance to moving to the Cloud. Legally there are some issues. They are very controlled by the gaming authorities – so maybe there are some barriers they have to push through. But I look at some of the challenges they also have – one of the things I thought was very interesting when I worked for them 10-15 years ago was progressive slots, which were one of the “big things” at that time. Where a bunch of machines were aggregated against a single jackpot. And this required dedicated T1 and T3 lines back to the slot manufacturers so they could do this real time aggregation of data and real-time payouts. That would obviously be so much easier if you could do it in the cloud. So the questions would be could you get this past the gaming commissions and could you make it secure enough. Well…Amazon right now is building a Cloud facility for the CIA, if they can convince the CIA to use the Cloud…”

    But you’ve seen the movies and read the stories – they make you think that the CIA is run by clowns. Of course the conspiracy side of that is they want you to underestimate them, but still it makes you wonder.

    “I go back to argument I made earlier. I have a hard time believing that an environment set up in the cloud is any less secure than your data center that’s connected to the Internet. In fact, it’s probably more secure.

    I think the thing that security guys are concerned with is their whole strategy in the past has been how do I wall everything off? How do I provide defense in layers? At the point where more of your infrastructure is shared, it becomes harder to know where those walls are being crossed, which makes them more and more uncomfortable. But the challenge is, what if a competitor figures out how to do a secure solution in the cloud? There’s a real possibility that they traditional technology folks may not be in business down the road because the costs of operating in the Cloud will be so much lower. And that’s what’s going to end up happening – those guys who are staying in-house, staying with their co-lo, and some point in time there’s going to be some startup that says “we’re going to be disruptive, we’re going to blow up this entire industry, we’re going to look at it differently, our cost basis is going to be so mucfh lower for providing this service that will out-compete them. And over time, that incumbent goes away.

    We’ve seen that again and again, where it isn’t even a brand new business. Heck, Amazon – selling books is not a brand new business – it’s a really, really old business. But they came in and did some pretty interesting things driving their costs way. And figuring out all those things they could do to bring on additional ancillary revenue. What happened to all those big booksellers?

    Or shipping. Look at Fedex, the whole concept that someone could build an airport outside a city in the Midwest…and now the Post Office is almost out of the business of delivering packages.”

    So if you are not actively and continuously thinking about how to use the advantages the cloud can provide, then you are living on borrow time.

    “Exactly”

  • Mobile Apps and Big Data Megatrends Drive Application Performance Management

    Mobile Apps and Big Data Megatrends Drive Application Performance Management

    As the megatrends of Big Data, mobility and cloud continue to reshape the IT landscape many companies are responding by refocusing their solutions to provide better visibility and support for these technologies.  Case in point is AppDynamics new Spring 2014 release announced yesterday (full disclosure, AppDynamics is a sponsor on devopsy.kinsta.cloud but that sponsorship has nothing to do with editorial content, just banners).

    Jyoti Final_1I had a chance to catch up with Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics yesterday. Jyoti made it very plain that mobile applications are quickly tipping the bar in terms of what types of applications his customers are asking for support on. That along with enhanced NoSQL support and support of some for some of the hottest languages being used in development today (Node.js and Scala) lead the way in his company’s latest release.

    Gartner has weighed in on the increasing importance of monitoring mobile app performance.  Jonah Kowall, research vice president at Gartner, in a recent report states, “driven by the increasing significance of mobile application endpoints and increasingly dynamic Web technologies, end-user-experience monitoring will become even more important to enterprises. In fact, it is likely to shift its center of gravity from monitoring the end-user experience of individual applications to monitoring and analyzing end-user behaviors across the entire portfolio of applications available to an end-user at any given endpoint.”

    Personally I don’t think any of us need Gartner to tell us that there is an app for just about anything and many of them are mobile. Mobility is changing the way so many of us work. Mobile apps are poised to overtake web browsing sometime this year says Jyoti.

    If anything is bigger than mobile though it may be Big Data. It seems that Big Data is everywhere. I saw an interesting stat the other day, something along the lines of 90% of all the data stored in the world is less than two years old. I guess that explains why we didn’t hear as much about Big Data before that.  In any event there is big money being poured into Big Data solutions. Evidence of this is Intel’s Cloudera investment, $740m for 18% of the company. Cloudera is a Hadoop distributor of course and part of the AppDynamics new Big Data support is for enhanced Hadoop features.

    NoSQL companies have also been a big beneficiary of the Big Data megatrend  and VC investment of course. One of the biggest beneficiaries is MongoDB (again in full disclosure, devopsy.kinsta.cloud is a media sponsor of MongoDB World).  Matt Asay who has written here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud and is also the VP of Marketing and Business Development had this to say about AppDynamics new NoSQL support. “Together with AppDynamics and MongoDB, organizations can now leverage application performance management solutions to gain further insight into their MongoDB-based applications. This partnership allows users end-to-end visibility for optimal performance in production, an important feature for companies as they scale their MongoDB deployments.”

    To be accurate all of these new features in the Spring 2014 release of AppDynamics have actually been available already for at least a few weeks or months. In my conversation with Bansal I asked him that if he didn’t see a little irony in the fact that a DevOps enabler like AppDynamics still did somewhat traditional software releases instead of some sort of continuous delivery.  Bansal said that these once a quarter releases are really just packaging up features that are released in a continuous fashion over the preceding quarter.  These quarterly releases serve as a checkpoint, version control if you will.  In actuality though AppDynamic customers have been getting this functionality as it comes out.

    Application Performance Management seems to be a very hot area. In large part because of the mega trends of Big Data, mobility and cloud. It remains to be seen if these solutions will become part of (by acquisition or partnership) the bigger Application Development Lifecycle Management (ALM) market.