Plutora grabs Top 3 Award for release management

Today we are happy to announce that Plutora has earned the EMA DevOps Top 3 Award for Release Management. Full findings and details are available in the recently delivered EMA DevOps 2020 report.

What is the DevOps 2020 report?

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) provide empirical research about the current state of DevOps adoption, perceptions and goals. As DevOps matures and evolves in multiple direction, businesses struggle with identifying a winning strategy for their goals. The DevOps 2020 Report provides information about the current state of DevOps, enterprise buying behavior over the past two years and competitive analysis of DevOps market segments.

20 categories of DevOps related tools were evaluated in the report with a deeper dive into 8 categories including Release Management. By understanding the tools utilized and future buying plans, we can gain an understanding of some key questions such as:

• What activities encompass your DevOps practices today?

• How mature is your DevOps practice?

• How strategic is your DevOps transition?

Why so much interest in DevOps?

DevOps is such a popular buzzword that it means many different things to many different people. (I’m a marketing guy…whenever I hear “buzzword”, it means marketing guys around the world are attaching it to their product line to obtain better search metrics. Pick any technology, add “DevOps” to it and do a search – you’ll likely find a hit. 😊)

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Personally, I like Gene Kim’s definition best:

“I would define DevOps by the outcomes. In my mind, DevOps is those set of cultural norms and technology practices that enable the fast flow of planned work from, among others, development, through tests into operations while preserving world class reliability, operation and security.
DevOps is not about what you do, but what your outcomes are. So many things that we associate with DevOps fits underneath this very broad umbrella of beliefs and practices—which of course, communication and culture are part of them.”

Reading this, what stands out to me is Deliver applications faster, Higher quality and security and Better collaboration and communication. Interestingly enough, part of the DevOps 2020 survey directly asks the respondents about their goals – you know, the reason their companies are spending significant amounts of money, time and cultural change. The top 3 reasons we hear from our customers are echoed in the report. Companies want to:

1. Improve the speed of software delivery

2. Improve agility in addressing changing market needs

3. Improve the customer experience

DevOps isn’t just about new technology, it’s the culture and processes that focus on these 3 outcomes and a commitment to continual improvement.

Why is this interesting to Plutora?

At Plutora, we recognize that every business transaction is powered by software. Focusing on the customer experience and providing customer value is the game changer (click here for a cool article by Alberto Brea). The speed of delivery, the right experience and a trustworthy computing experience reaps customer loyalty – and their money.

Our mission is to empower high quality software delivery at the speed of business across the entire portfolio.

How does release management fit?

Release management as a practice is somewhat new. It used to mean the activities related to deploying software into production. Release managers today deal with so much more – they are involved in the entire delivery pipeline managing the various teams. Their activities include:

• Release Level Planning and Coordination

• Multi-pipeline Planning and Coordination

• IT Resource Dependencies (Test Environments, Systems, Test Data, QA, Operations)

• Regulatory Compliance Enforcement

• Operational Readiness & Cutover Orchestration

• Organization-wide Visibility to Changes

• Continuous Improvement

• Oh….and do all of this faster, but don’t screw up!

Release management is SO much more than just automation. I really like the Gartner graphic on this topic:

According to the Gartner report, 73% of the organizational focus for DevOps scaling is related to people, culture and process. Plutora release planning, management and orchestration addresses that aspect of the application delivery process.

In the EMA DevOps 2020 report, Plutora was evaluated on nine criteria to establish its place in the top three. The criteria included segment penetration, product design, architecture and scalability, ease of integration, interoperability and deployment, cost, support, services and reputation, and overall product satisfaction.

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The Plutora Continuous Delivery Management Platform’s overall score was 95, which is indicative of an exceptional product that has consistently high component scores, including:

• A product penetration score of 95, indicating our effectiveness at delivering our message into the market

• A feature score of 90, scoring well across all seven product capability categories

• An overall satisfaction score of 84, showing plenty of satisfied customers but identifying how we can be even better in the future

Check out the report

Be sure to download the report and check out more details on the findings. You can download the report from here: https://go.plutora.com/devops-2020-top3