Why Accelerating Application Release Delivery is key to "Business Agility"

by Rich Bourdeau

“Business Agility” is probably one of the most over used marketing terms hyped by enterprise technology companies. When companies say they want to become more agile what does that mean? In most cases getting faster at provisioning infrastructure and applications is not what they mean by becoming more agile. Getting faster and more efficient at these specific tasks is just the means to the end. That end is delivering value to their customers. For companies that rely on technology, new and updated applications are the engine that drives business opportunity and competitive advantage.

For these companies “Business Agility” means getting faster and more efficient at the application delivery process. In recent years, many companies have implemented agile development processes with continuous integration and smaller more frequent releases. While developers are getting faster at turning out code, getting that code through all the different stages from development and into production remains a huge challenge for most companies. Manual processes that worked OK with 9-12 month release cycles can’t stand up to the demands of quarterly, monthly or even more frequent releases.

vRealize Automation helps this problem, because it gets infrastructure and application environments in the hands of engineers in hours and minutes vs days and weeks using manual processes. Automating IT service delivery for each of the group or stage in the release delivery pipeline helps with part of the application delivery process; however, it is just a one task that needs to be executed at each stage of the software delivery process. Companies leverage a variety of software development lifecycle tools to coordinate the build deployment and testing at each stage. With more frequent releases, the problem becomes not only performing these tasks faster, but coordinating across these different environments to make sure that you are deploying and testing the same software versions and configurations at each stage in the process.

vRealize Code Stream is an application release automation and continuous delivery solution that allows developers and operations teams to release software more frequently and efficiently, all the while leveraging their investments in existing developer and operations tools. For customers who already use vRealize Automation, vRealize Code Stream is a complementary offering that extends automation to the entire release process itself. Beyond provisioning, it integrates with Continuous Integration, test and repository solutions to push new software automatically from development and test to staging and production environments, saving the time and errors typically associated with manual procedures and hand-offs.