In case you hadn’t noticed, automated everything is all the rage in the IT products and services world. There’s at least one company so into the trend that it’s even named for it: Automic.
Actually, Automic predates the current automation trend by an entire generation, seeing the IT automation future years ago. It started way back in 1985 by developing an early job scheduling software application and has been evolving and expanding its product line ever since.
The Bellevue, Wash. and Vienna-based company provides private cloud, big data, Internet of things and DevOps packages to about 2,600 customers, including such household names as GE, Bosch, eBay, Netflix and Vodafone.
Automic stakes a claim as the largest pure-play automation vendor in the market, focusing solely on business automation for more than 20 years. Its software enables IT system agility and reliability within on-premises, cloud or hybrid landscapes; it is put to work most often in areas such as Release Automation/DevOps and Workload Automation, Orchestration and Provisioning.
The company on April 4 released a major update to its main product, the Automic Release Automation. Key features, according to the company, are as follows:
• A cloud-based sandbox: A virtual sandbox where organizations are able to test the product on the Automic cloud-based preview site–the first of its kind in its market.
• A DevOps maturity assessment service: By answering a set of simple questions, enterprises can benchmark themselves against the Automic standard, or against their peers, their industry, their region or globally.
• Visualization of the delivery pipeline for all applications: Simplification of the planning, management and execution of deployment and release activities of multiple teams and applications across the entire organization is made possible with the new pipeline visualization dashboard plugin within Automic Release Automation. Dev and Ops can immediately visualize their entire deployment pipeline to better understand the impact and time implications of multiple concurrent releases throughout the organization.
• Deployment to public, private or hybrid cloud from a multi-tenant platform: Enterprises and service providers are able to serve multiple departments and clients in isolation from each other on a single shared platform, scaling for extremely large environments while driving cost of ownership down, simplifying operations and maintenance.
Automic is sort of squeezed in the middle when it comes to the business process automation market. It competes with well-known old-schoolers such as IBM, BMC and CA in addition to newer competitors such as Puppet, Chef, Jenkins and XebiaLabs.
Automic is owned by EQT, a large private equity group in Northern Europe, after its acquisition from The Carlyle Group in 2012 for $270 million. The company will stage its annual conference in Berlin May 30 and 31.