UC4 Blog

Embarrassing Events Like Bugs and Outages Are Entirely Avoidable

April 17th, 2012 No Comments

Global DevOps teams are being mandated to reduce the time, cost, complexity and risk associated with continuous delivery of customer-facing, revenue generating applications. In the financial services industry this process is being made more challenging by intense competition and regulatory compliance acts such as Dodd Frank.

“(Reuters) – In a breakdown that resembled a mini version of the 2010 “flash crash,” a series of glitches hit the market debut of BATS Global Markets Inc on Friday, causing the company to take the extremely rare step of withdrawing its initial public offering of shares.”

BATS isn’t alone! In an inter-connected global economy, several financial institutions have recently experienced public facing outages negatively impacting millions of customers and brand opinion polls. To address these issues, companies need to focus on three critical points:

Strategies to optimize the processes required to deliver business critical applications in every stage of the SDLC, from development through production in the financial services industry.
How clients, partners and internal users of these applications are driving the need for more features, faster transactional throughput, sub-millisecond access to transactional and financial information, and predictable SLAs for quality and reliability.
How to effectively manage an environment where time-to-market is critical and failure is unacceptable.

To read more about this topic, check out a recent ComputerWeekly article, BATS Software Bug Hits Business Strategy, or contact us to learn more.

Attention: SunGard Higher Education Banner Users

March 26th, 2012 No Comments

SunGard Higher Education Banner applications are helpful for aligning IT operations with your academic institutions’ requirements, but they can also create major challenges for your IT staff, including manual interventions for report generation, financial aid processing, and lack of visibility across your IT environment.

Join John Sundet, Sr. Systems Analyst/Programmer at College of St. Benedict /St. John’s University and Matt Busch, UC4 Sr. Product Manager; as they discuss how a unified automation platform can turn manual cross-functional Banner activities, into well-orchestrated, automated and predictable process.

Attend this webcast and learn how an automation platform can improve your Banner applications including:

Streamlining finance, payroll, student, financial aid, and alumni file processing
Automate Banner ODS processing
Automating batch processes and report generation
Preventing server overload
Managing complex interdependencies across heterogeneous IT infrastructure

To reserve your spot, register here.

UC4 Takes Leadership in Gartner Magic Quadrant!

March 14th, 2012 No Comments

After an 18-month period of particularly strong momentum for UC4, the results are rolling in! UC4′s most recent achievement involves advancement into the Leadership quadrant of Gartner, Inc.’s Workload Automation Magic Quadrant. As many of you are aware, Gartner’s highly regarded Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation report is based on detailed customer surveys, interviews and analysis by Gartner.

According to Gartner, the Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation tracks the market evolution from job scheduling to workload automation and evaluates vendors and their technologies in the workload automation market. As stated in the Gartner report, “the workload automation market has rapidly evolved from the job scheduling arena. Self-service capabilities, policy-driven workload management, predictive functionality, business impact analysis, and support for mobile devices and automation platforms are some areas of vendor differentiation.” And UC4’s products address these trends head-on.

For a limited time, UC4 is offering free access to the complete Gartner Research Report, “Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation, 2012” on the key technologies that make up the workload automation landscape—and the vendors who are leading the field. Don’t miss out, download the report today!

Live Update from Innovate EMEA 2012

March 14th, 2012 No Comments

Today concludes the 11th annual UC4 Innovate user conference in Europe, and we were thrilled by the number of customers and partners that participated in this milestone. UC4 has experienced many exciting developments over the past year including being named by Forrester as the leading IT Process Automation vendor, launching our ONE Automation platform, and adding over 100 new customers. This year’s conference put a strong emphasis on innovation in automation up and across the software stack – the full UC4 ONE Automation solution set.

Several presentations took place over the two day event, including an insightful guest keynote speech from Torsten Volk, IT Automation Analyst from EMA, on the future of the IT Automation market, and a full update on UC4′s Application Release Automation strategy for the coming year from Wesley Pullen, Vice President of ARA Technology for UC4. We also heard several compelling presentations from partners and customers around Europe, including:

A1 Telekom
APS Enterprise
GKVI
Kabel Deutschland
KlopoTek
KPN B.V.
Levatis
Pidpa Belgium
PTC/T-Mobile
Turkcell

Here are a couple snapshots we took at the scene, and we will post a link to the full photo album shortly.

UC4 Application Release Automation V2 Now Available!

March 13th, 2012 No Comments

UC4 announced the general availability of UC4 Application Release Automation V2 today! The new version of Application Release Automation enables IT organizations, for the first time, to plan software releases, track progression and perform automated deployment – all from a single Web-based interface. It also simplifies implementation by delivering built-in support for common middleware, source code management tools and issue tracking tools.

UC4 Application Release Automation V2 includes the following new capabilities:

New Web-based user interface supports drag-and-drop deployment process definition and enables users to manage release processes from a simple, integrated interface
Application and component modeling minimizes failures by identifying unmet dependencies
Test environment scheduling ensures required test and staging environments are available at the right time, preventing unnecessary project delays
Built-in Application Server support for deploying applications on IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, JBoss and Microsoft IIS application servers accelerates implementations
Built-in integration support for Source Code Management tools, such as Concurrent Versions System (CVS), Apache Subversion (SVN) and Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), makes it easy to fully automate deployment in testing, staging and production
New unified roles and access control management capabilities enhance security and help ensure compliance with industry regulations
Support for deploying incremental application updates expedites the deployment process
New Application Management Database (AMDB) with API accessibility for integration with CMDB and other repositories

Read the press release for more info and check out this new, two-minute demo on UC4 Application Release Automation, and let us know what you think!

Three Weeks Until Innovate Europe – Time to Register Today!

February 24th, 2012 No Comments

With the UC4 Innovate EMEA user conference just three weeks away (March 13-14 in Berlin, Germany), it is getting busy around here! For returning conference attendees, you might notice the conference has a new name this year – UC4 Innovate User Conference – which replaces the previous UC4 Integrate conference name. It will be all about innovation in automation up and across the software stack – infrastructure automation, application automation, release automation, as well as SLA policy orchestration automation – the full UC4 ONE Automation solution set.

To help live up to its new name, the lineup of speakers consists of several innovative leaders in the industry. We are especially pleased to have as one of our keynote speakers, Torsten Volk, an English and German speaking IT industry analyst from the firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). Like other industry analyst firms – such as Gartner, IDC, and Forrester – EMA includes IT automation as one of its primary focus areas. Torsten has many years in the IT automation industry and will be coming to speak at the conference to give our customers and users an industry perspective, and how UC4 plays into the future of IT automation.

The full lineup of speakers can be found on the UC4 Innovate EMEA website, or use this link to register today!

3 Simple Steps to Unlocking Application Release Bottlenecks

February 22nd, 2012 No Comments

Agile development methods have changed the way we build business applications. But what good is incremental, continuous software delivery, if it takes IT operations days or weeks to deploy updates to the production environment?

On Wednesday, February 29th, UC4′s senior solutions architect, Scott Wilson, will be conducting a complimentary live webinar where he will uncover three simple steps that companies can take with an automated solution to reduce application deployment time from days down to hours. Scott will introduce best practices for application release management and explain how you can bring agility to operations while overcoming common security and compliance obstacles.

During this 45 minute webinar, you will learn how to:

Implement agile operations for continuous deployment
Automate deployment in pre-production and production
Improve end-to-end visibility into the software release process

Click here to register today before the all of the slots fill up!

UPDATE: If you missed this awesome webinar, its not too late! Access it on-demand here on our website UC4.com.

UC4 Redefining (and Refining) the Application Release Automation Market

February 14th, 2012 No Comments

Today, UC4 had big news hit the streets with the acquisition of Ventum Solutions, an Austrian-based software provider that specializes in enterprise release management.

So what does this mean for UC4 customers? Quite simply, it means life is going to get even easier when it comes to delivering custom applications, moving applications to the Cloud or implementing DevOps. With the acquisition of Ventum, UC4’s ONE Automation platform now has an end-to-end solution that unifies the release planning and control process with application deployment in testing, staging and production.

Already fully integrated, UC4’s application release automation solution now combines planning, control and automation. New features include:

Application and component modeling minimizes failures by identifying unmet dependencies
Test environment scheduling ensures required test and staging environments are available at the right time, preventing unnecessary project delays
Centralized approval process eliminates errors and provides great visibility into the release process
Resource conflict identification eliminates process resource contention

Check out the our new whitepaper, Empowering DevOps: Implementing a Real Application Release Automation Solution, to learn more about achieving seamless application deployment and maintenance across your infrastructure.

Happy New Year!!!

December 29th, 2011 No Comments

Happy New Year from the IT process automation experts at UC4! We wish you, your family, and your business much happiness and success in the coming year. We have lots in store for 2012! Find out by visiting www.uc4.com or check back here for regular updates in the new year.

A Stress-Less Holiday Season with Workload Automation

December 5th, 2011 No Comments

Does the holiday season have you working extra hours to meet the added job scheduling demands?

Through real-time monitoring of processes, applications, and the entire IT environment, UC4 matches your projected job plan against available resources, allocates resources on demand, and makes real-time decisions on job routing. By eliminating the need for manual intervention, UC4 not only saves you time, freeing you up for more strategic tasks, but it also reduces the errors that often accompany manual steps.

You can save up to 40% of your time next holiday season with a unified workload automation solution. To learn more about UC4’s offering, register for our upcoming webinar on Thursday, December 15th at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time: Workload Automation for the Less Planned, More On-demand World.