UC4 challenges the "Big 4" IT Process Automation Vision

BELLEVUE, WA and Vienna, Austria - February 14, 2012 - UC4, the leader in IT Process Automation, is redefining application release automation by combining planning, control and automation through the acquisition of Ventum Solutions, a software provider specialising in enterprise release management. Application release automation is a key capability for organisations struggling with DevOps, IT as a Service, Cloud and Big Data initiatives.

"UC4's ONE Automation platform is well suited to address the growing demand for application release automation accelerated by new technologies and models such as cloud and virtualisation," said Jason Liu, CEO, UC4 Software. "With the acquisition of Ventum, UC4 now has an end-to-end solution that unifies the application release process with operational IT process automation in the datacenter. The UC4 automation engine provides a seamless way to deploy and maintain applications and their infrastructure."
UC4 Logo
UC4 Logo

According to Gartner, over the next four years, 25 percent of large IT organisations that develop custom applications will establish release teams that span application development and production and are focused on continuous delivery. With some release processes having as many as 400 different automation tasks, an ARA tool adds reliability to the deployment process - with less custom scripting and by documenting variations across environments to reduce configuration errors and downtime.

"We've been closely following the application release automation market since we identified it as the critical link between development and operations and a major driver for IT process automation," said Rachel Chalmers, RD Infrastructure, 451 Research. "The addition of Ventum's release planning and coordination capabilities to UC4's deployment engine offers an intriguing new prospect for IT and application development organisations that must combine agility with central management, security and control."

UC4 Application Release Automation is an end-to-end solution for planning, coordinating and automating software releases, including automated deployment of applications across large-scale server environments. It streamlines application release workflow management for even the largest enterprise environments while reducing deployment cost in the process.

Ventum's enterprise release management software adds key capabilities to UC4's solution:

    Application and component modeling minimises failures by identifying unmet dependencies

    Test environment scheduling ensures required test and staging environments are available at the right time, preventing unnecessary project delays

    Centralised approval process eliminates errors and provides great visibility into the release process

    Resource conflict identification eliminates process resource contention

Already integrated with UC4's Application Release Automation, Ventum's solution enables release managers to initiate a deployment using UC4's automation engine from within Ventum's UI. Tighter integration is currently being developed to provide even greater efficiencies and cost savings.

To learn more about UC4's ARA product, see the white paper: UC4 Application Release Automation