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Tag: XebiaLabs

  • XebiaLabs Innovates Pipeline Orchestration, Adds New Release Dashboards and Introduces DevOps ChatBot

    New Version of XL Release Helps Enterprises Orchestrate and Control Large and Complex Releases, so They Can Produce Software More Quickly and With Fewer Errors

    BOSTON, MA–(Marketwired – May 3, 2016) – XebiaLabs, a recognized leader in DevOps and Continuous Delivery software tools, today announced the launch of XL Release version 5.0 as well as XL Deploy version 5.5 and a new DevOps ChatBot.

    XL Release allows companies to automate, orchestrate and gain visibility into their software release pipelines at enterprise scale. XL Release 5.0 simplifies the way stakeholders get insight into the software delivery process — from IT executives to program managers to developers. The new configurable dashboards and productivity features are designed to help manage complex, multi-level and interdependent software release pipelines.

    “As releases happen faster and pipelines grow more complex, enterprises know they need to do more than automate their release processes. Just as importantly, they need a way to understand, organize, manage and monitor large amounts of interdependent release information,” said Derek Langone, CEO at XebiaLabs. “We designed the new capabilities to meet the needs of large enterprises that are focused on achieving business results — whether they are working with existing middleware and big data systems, or implementing new container or IoT initiatives.”

    XL Release 5.0 Highlights

    • Customizable Release Dashboard: Release teams now have new, easy-to-use dashboards that show what’s in each release at a glance. The dashboards can be custom-configured to display a team’s most important status indicators and metrics, such as overall release progress, compliance and audit details, features delivered, issues found, and open tickets resolved. They can also show information from other tools that play a part in the software delivery pipeline, such as JIRA, Jenkins, XL Deploy or ServiceNow. XL Release’s new dashboards provide a new level of visibility to everyone who has a stake in the release, from the CIO to the Risk Management team to the Release Manager or the DevOps team.
    • Advanced Release Pipeline Orchestration: XL Release 5.0 delivers the unique ability to manage interconnected pipelines as a whole unit, so it’s easy to determine when a delay in one pipeline will affect delivery for an entire business feature.  New releases can now be automatically launched from within another release, releases become automatically linked and teams can quickly see how all releases fit together. This capability helps organizations manage more complex release patterns: they can automatically orchestrate dozens of related releases, manage dependencies between releases, group related releases, and easily divide the work between teams. XL Release 5.0 also adds a new expanded table view that lets teams better organize and manage complex, interdependent releases.

    Release Orchestration Delivers Business Results
    Unlike other release orchestration tools, XL Release 5.0 automatically tracks the impact of dependent releases on the current release, so delays at any level of the process can be quickly discovered and fixed.

    By automating even more of the release process and automatically managing dependencies, enterprises can release software faster, with fewer errors. Organizations get the detailed visibility they need to monitor the process and keep track of their features throughout the software development lifecycle with a unified view that spans third party tools. With XL Release’s added visibility and control, DevOps and Continuous Delivery initiatives become more effective and efficient.

    Enhanced Cloud Provisioning Options for XL Deploy
    In conjunction with XL Release 5.0, XebiaLabs also released version 5.5 of its popular XL Deploy product, which provides enterprise-scale deployment automation for any environment, from Docker to mainframes. The new version integrates provisioning of cloud environments as part of the deployment process, eliminating the need to wait days or even weeks to get the cloud resources that teams require. Developers can now more easily “self-service”: they can spin-up and tear down cloud environments as part of their automated deployment, and the system ensures that necessary controls are met. This capability helps teams save money by making the most efficient use of cloud resources. It also gives them deeper visibility into — and better control of — deployments for both applications and environments.

    ChatOps – a ChatBot for DevOps
    To help DevOps teams better communicate, XebiaLabs recently introduced a new ChatOps feature. Many DevOps teams already use chat tools extensively to work more efficiently and bring together distributed teams. The new plugin for XL Deploy facilitates communication and increases productivity by letting teams monitor deployment activity, trigger deployments and troubleshoot incidents from inside their chat tool of choice, such as HipChat or Slack. More details are available on the XebiaLabs blog at:http://blog.xebialabs.com/2016/04/22/xebialabs-launches-chatops-automation-software/

    XebiaLabs customers are eager to use the new product features. “The new version of XL Release offers interesting new dashboarding functionality that will help us see what’s in each release and get better visibility into release status. Also, the advanced release orchestration will let us automatically manage parent/child relationships between different releases,” said Sander Ettema, Manager, Linux Unix at Rabobank ICT. “These new features provide a lot of value in a complex environment like ours.”

    Availability
    XL Release 5.0 and XL Deploy 5.5 are available now. Download a free trial:
    www.XebiaLabs.com/XL-Release
    www.XebiaLabs.com/XL-Deploy

    About XebiaLabs
    XebiaLabs develops enterprise-scale Continuous Delivery and DevOps software, providing companies with the visibility, automation and control they need to deliver software faster and with less risk. Global market leaders rely on XebiaLabs to meet the increasing demand for accelerated and more reliable software releases. For more information, please visithttp://www.xebialabs.com.

    CONTACT INFORMATION

  • XEBIALABS ANNOUNCES RECORD GROWTH AS ENTERPRISE DEVOPS AND CONTINUOUS DELIVERY ADOPTION ACCELERATES

    Global Market Leaders Select XebiaLabs for Enterprise-Scale DevOps & Continuous Delivery
    BOSTON, MA — (Marketwired) — 02/04/16 — XebiaLabs today announced record software subscription growth as market demand for its DevOps and Continuous Delivery solutions accelerates. Some of the largest and most successful companies in the financial services, manufacturing, retail and technology sectors have selected XebiaLabs’ deployment automation and release orchestration software to gain full visibility into their software release process, reduce application deployment failures, dramatically reduce deployment times and help them ship better software.

    To take advantage of the growing momentum and accelerate growth, in April 2015 XebiaLabs appointed Derek Langone as Chief Executive Officer. The 20-year software industry veteran has held multiple leadership roles in high-growth software companies, including President of SmartBear Software, where he helped the software quality tools provider grow 1,500% in five years while executing four acquisitions. Since Derek has taken the helm at XebiaLabs, the company accelerated its revenue growth and completed the last quarter of the year with 148% growth in subscription bookings.

    “XebiaLabs is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the massive shift to DevOps in the enterprise. Our agentless technology allows for automated deployment to mainframes right through to automation of the newest container technologies and on to connected devices. Our focus on data collection and reporting brings insight and actionable intelligence to the software release orchestration process for the first time,” said Langone. “However, the greatest asset XebiaLabs brings to the market is our six years of singular focus guiding the largest companies with the most complex environments across the globe to realize the benefit of DevOps at scale.”

    “Rapid software delivery is becoming increasingly business-critical as evidenced by growth and interest well beyond the ‘unicorn’ phase to a broader, more mainstream enterprise DevOps market,” said Jay Lyman, Research Manager, 451 Research. “DevOps and Continuous Delivery increasingly represent standard practices in the enterprise, but organizations still struggle with complexity, culture and gaining visibility into their process to ensure releases are safe and reliable, as well as fast. Providers such as XebiaLabs sit in between large enterprise users and the expansive array of tools, systems and other software critical to effective DevOps implementations.”

    Other XebiaLabs highlights from 2015 include:

    • Major customer wins and multi-year contracts from leading brands such as ING Bank, Priceline, Hyundai and many other global financial services, retail, manufacturing, and technology organizations.
    • 2015 was marked by product innovation and multiple new product releases. These releases included new features for advanced release orchestration, satellite deployment, and dependency management as well as new dashboards for software quality, which allow teams to significantly simplify the management of large and complex software releases.
    • XebiaLabs pioneered release automation with industry-first capabilities to manage the complex dependencies between microservices throughout the application release and deployment process. This capability is becoming crucial with the proliferation of microservices in enterprise application architectures.
    • As companies begin to implement Docker and other container technologies at scale, they discover that release management and deployment problems present new challenges. XebiaLabs continued to innovate to help companies manage hybrid deployments and multiple interdependent release pipelines with ease. The company’s tools provide enterprises with much-needed visibility, compliance, security, reporting, auditability, and process enforcement for their container releases.
    • To support the growing enterprise demand for cloud solutions, XebiaLabs announced partnerships with Amazon and Microsoft. XebiaLabs was selected to the Amazon AWS DevOps Competency Network and enables Amazon’s CodePipeline users to deploy applications to on-premises and hybrid IT infrastructures. In addition, XL Deploy was accepted into the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
    • XebiaLabs received recognition as a key vendor in all major industry reports from Gartner, 451 Research and Forrester Research. The most recent report from 451 research is available for download: https://xebialabs.com/resources/analyst-reports/speed-in-growing-devops-deployment-of-applications/.
    • In 2015 XebiaLabs was also selected as the DevOps and Continuous delivery partner for several recognized systems integrators who are dedicating considerable resources to their expanding Enterprise DevOps practices.
    • The XebiaLabs team was tapped to share its domain expertise and market vision at scores of DevOps and Continuous Delivery conferences, webinars and other events. It also launched The Periodic Table of DevOps Tools online. Since its launch, the table garnered more than 250,000 unique views and has been used to illustrate the DevOps market landscape at industry conferences worldwide.

    About XebiaLabs
    XebiaLabs develops enterprise-scale Continuous Delivery and DevOps software, providing companies with the visibility, automation and control they need to deliver software faster and with less risk. Global market leaders rely on XebiaLabs to meet the increasing demand for accelerated and more reliable software releases. For more information, please visit http://www.xebialabs.com.

    Press Contacts:
    Heather Moses
    VP Marketing
    Email Contact

  • How Continuous Delivery is Changing Software Development

    How Continuous Delivery is Changing Software Development

    When you start to implement a new methodology, it’s very easy to get bogged down by the specifics and lose sight of the overall goal. With Continuous Delivery, we see endless debate about whether to use Puppet, Chef, or Salt for deployment, or discussion about how to build a CD pipeline with containers. These are just technical challenges to overcome. They’re implementation details that have little to do with why CD is such a powerful choice for businesses.

    What’s the most important metric for your software? It’s not the speed of delivery, the number of features, the performance under load, or the defect count. It’s end user satisfaction. The question you need to ask and keep asking is – How well does your software cater for the people using it?

    The CD mindset keeps you laser-focused on that metric in two very important ways.

    Real representation for the end user

    Too many organizations are still just paying lip service to this concept. The developers and testers working on a piece of software often have no contact with end users, and that can mean that they have very little idea about their needs. If you really want to create a great piece of software for someone, then you have to understand how they work. What are their requirements and constraints?

    Traditionally, software development has been siloed. Individual departments have focused on their own tasks first. Developers may be delighted with their clean repository layout. QA may be satisfied with how complete the test coverage is. But neither of these things tells you about the end user experience. The system may be completely unusable.

    Personal contact is a great idea. If your team actually talks directly to end users, asks questions, and learns to empathize, then you’ll see the benefit in the product.

    CD also encourages greater visibility. Not just oversight for management, but for the whole team. Everyone, from development, through QA and operations, to the actual end users should get a look at how the overall service is being put together and delivered. Have channels in place so that anyone can contribute to service improvements, regardless of their area or expertise. Greater visibility over the process, and an ability to influence it, makes for a really cohesive, motivated team.

    Collecting, analyzing, and acting on the right data

    You can empower everyone on the team to make suggestions and you can say that end user satisfaction is paramount, but without collecting the right data you aren’t going to be able to realize the benefits of this approach. You need help understanding where the opportunities for improvement are, and it’s vital to measure the impact of what you’re doing.

    In the big data age, it’s common for companies to collect all sorts of statistics. It’s easy to automate the capture of technical operational details such as CPU load or memory usage, but how much do they really tell you? Though it may be more challenging to find out whether your end users are satisfied, it’s also a lot more important.

    Eliminate the risks of educated guesses and gut feelings. Apply a solid methodology to improve your service based on user feedback, just as you hone technical performance based on technical data. You don’t need to spend hours brainstorming new features. You can analyze end user interaction, find a pain point, create a hypothesis about the cause, tweak the system to address it, deploy the change, and measure how it really performs.

    Adopting this process and repeating it over and over will improve your service. Because you’re rolling out small changes, it can be done quickly and efficiently, with easy rollback if required. As long as you’re careful to measure your hypothesis and the effectiveness of your solution each time, there’s no downside.

    The ideas here are nothing new. Your marketing department most likely already conducts A/B testing and measures user interaction. But how many companies are really taking the holistic approach, applying these concepts also to software development and delivery?

    To make the end user the focus, and really leverage the potential of Continuous Delivery, the whole team has to pull in the same direction. Agile and CD methodologies help you cut down barriers, set shared goals, and keep the focus firmly on the customer to revolutionize the way software is delivered for the people who need it.

    About the Author/Andrew Phillips

    AndrewPhillipsAndrew Phillips heads up product management at XebiaLabs, a provider of continuous delivery automation. Andrew is an evangelist and thought leader in the DevOps, Cloud and Continuous Delivery space. He sits on the management team and drives product direction, positioning and planning.

  • Webinar: How One of the 15 Safest Banks in the World Outcompetes the Tech Disruptors

    Webinar: How One of the 15 Safest Banks in the World Outcompetes the Tech Disruptors

    The financial services industry has changed more in the last 15 years than in the previous thousand. Customers expect constant access through secure mobile interactions with providers; interactions that no longer take place within the four walls of a bank. At the same time, financial services companies are dealing with ever-growing regulation.

    Join Sander Ettema, Manager, Linux Infrastructure Services at Rabobank and Andrew Phillips, VP, Products for XebiaLabs as they examine how Rabobank has transformed its software delivery by implementing Agile development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. Learn tips on how to stay ahead of the curve in an age where the competitive landscape is shifting at light speed and rapidly moving beyond other financial services companies to include tech giants like Google and Apple.

    Attend and learn how to:

    • Create a culture of innovation and adapt your IT organization for rapid change.
    • Deliver on customer expectations by modernizing your IT software delivery landscape with an open platform for Continuous Delivery.
    • Get started quickly and leverage your existing IT infrastructure for rapid results and understand the key metrics to watch along the way.
    • Lead an IT transformation in the highly regulated environment of financial services.

     

    Recorded:  Wednesday, July 22, 2015

    Recording

    Slides

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    Your Host

    alan_new_head_shotAlan Shimel, Editor-in-Chief devopsy.kinsta.cloud, An often-cited personality in the security and technology community and a sought-after speaker at industry and government events, Alan has helped build several successful technology companies by combining a strong business background with a deep knowledge of technology.

    About the Panelists

    AndrewPhillipsAndrew Phillips

    VP, Products, XebiaLabs

    Andrew Phillips heads up product management at XebiaLabs where he drives product direction, positioning and planning. He is an evangelist and thought leader in the DevOps, Cloud and Delivery Automation space.

     

     

    Sander Ettema

    Manager, Infrastructure Linux Services, Rabobank

    Sander Ettema manages Linux/Unix Infrastructure Services for Rabobank, a global leader in food and agri financing and sustainability-oriented banking.  In addition to being a member of the DevOps workgroup, Sander oversees Linux/Unix/Appliances Hosting, Continuous Delivery services for Java as well as log management services.

  • XebiaLabs Offers Free Community Edition of XL Deploy & XL Release

    XebiaLabs Offers Free Community Edition of XL Deploy & XL Release

     

    BOSTON – November 18, 2014 — To introduce the DevOps community to the powerful benefits of launching applications to the market via automation, XebiaLabs today announced it will offer free community editions of both XL Deploy and XL Release. The company, a leading provider of enterprise software that enables DevOps and Continuous Delivery, is committed to empowering software developers to apply agility to their application release process with delivery automation solutions that add visibility and speed to the process. Fully-functional community editions of XL Deploy and XL Release can be accessed by visiting XebiaLabs.com and will allow 30 days of full technical support.

    525pixs XL ReleaseInternational corporations such as General Electric, Expedia, Xerox, KLM, and Société Générale use XL Deploy and XL Release to get applications into customer hands while reducing costly errors and downtime. CIOs, development managers and professionals in quality assurance, testing and operations at these organizations view the fast conversion of good ideas into marketable software as a critical imperative that drives business success.

    About XL Deploy – Agentless Deployment Automation

    XL Deploy is the leading Application Release Automation software that helps organizations deliver higher quality software faster. XL Deploy is agentless, model-based and fully automates the last mile of the Continuous Delivery process by eliminating the need for scripting.

    XL Deploy also features out-of-the-box integration with all leading build, provisioning, middleware and cloud solutions. The solution combines intelligent deployment automation, a rich content set covering everything from Docker to WebSphere, and seamless integration into the application delivery ecosystem.

    525pixels_XLDeploy_ReportsAbout XL Release – Continuous Delivery Pipeline Orchestration

    XL Release allows users to orchestrate their Continuous Delivery pipelines end-to-end. Users can analyze and progressively automate their release process while gaining enterprise security and control, handling pipeline dependencies, risk, and impact. XL Release is built for the enterprise with the security, access control, LDAP integration, and calendar integration one would expect delivered right out of the box. The solution offers a complete audit trail for the entire release process.

    XL Release can track and measure release progress and identify challenges early on as a situation evolves, repeat or skip tasks or phases as needed. Teams can evolve towards Continuous Delivery and finally integrate release management and execution while providing a path to fully automated delivery pipelines, resulting in the faster delivery of software.

    Tech Support for Community Editions of XL Deploy, XL Release

    Unlike most community editions, XebiaLabs will offer free technical support for up to 30 days. Users can be up and running in 15 minutes. For more information visit http://xebialabs.com/products/ or call (866) 656-4408 or write to sales-us@xebialabs.com.

    “Current software development processes cannot keep pace with the demand for the faster delivery of software,” said Coert Baart, XebiaLabs CEO. “While application development times have accelerated of late due to Agile, scrum and other methodologies, deployment best practices have not kept pace, resulting in a significant bottleneck at the point of application release.”