Summary Bullets:
• Application and platform lifecycle management (APLM) presents significant new opportunities for leading IT vendors to provide solutions that help enterprises manage the application and platform portfolio ecosystem across the entire lifecycle.
• APLM represents the most important issue facing enterprise customers, who want to leverage, manage and orchestrate cloud-native app development technologies, yet remain challenged to find an entry point through best practices and integrated solutions.
This year a team of GlobalData analysts will explore the emerging competitive landscape based on a new concept we call APLM, which reflects the convergence of modern application development platforms and architectures, cloud hybridization, and the orchestration, automation, security and integration of business and IT systems. New and evolving solutions are being built using virtualization and containerization, DevOps best practices, and orchestration capabilities.
While IT operations played a greater role in the application development and deployment process last year, albeit amid extreme configuration complexity, this year vendors will deliver on the promise of abstracted infrastructure and the management complexity associated with platform services, making it easier for developers to access sophisticated services including AI, mobile, and IoT, while providing operations with improved management capabilities throughout the application lifecycle.
At GlobalData, we have begun to define APLM and its key components, explore the driving forces behind what will be the most important technology issue in 2018 among enterprise DevOps and operations teams, and list some of the leading vendor offerings in this emerging market. (Please see Application and Platform Lifecycle Management Addresses Integrated DevOps Management Tools Critical to Enterprises in 2018, Dec. 22, 2017).
Solutions will be delivered in the form of tools and product suites, coupled with cloud services such as Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Red Hat OpenShift. Enterprises will be able to create apps in the cloud, on-premises, or within hybrid cloud environments, with access to integrated DevOps tools that support collaboration spanning the cycle of development and test through continuous delivery.
Some application platform providers have taken the lead in thought leadership and early releases around the APLM movement. Vendors have begun integrating ALM solutions into their traditional developer solutions. Some leading solutions include:
• IBM provides an APLM best practices guide via IBM Cloud App Service, offering toolchains wrapped around a typical DevOps lifecycle such as build, deploy, manage, auto testing, A/B testing, etc., including a source code control repository.
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) represent a convergence between Microsoft’s core development tools and ALM. Cloud services include cloud load testing, cloud build servers, and application insights. On-premises tools include integration with SharePoint sites and SQL Server reporting services.
• Oracle Developer Cloud Service (ODCS) is an integrated platform extending Oracle’s PaaS services via an issue-tracking system, agile development dashboards, code versioning and code-review platform, continuous integration and delivery automation, and team collaboration support via wikis and live activity streams. Oracle’s Wercker CICD for containers technology completes its APLM offering.
GlobalData’s coverage within APLM also includes data center technology providers such as Cisco, Dell, HPE, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, NetApp, Nutanix, Oracle, Red Hat, and VMware.
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