ServiceMesh Announces Agility Platform 9.1 with Expanded DevOps and Hybrid Cloud Capabilities

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Oct. 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- ServiceMesh, provider of the industry's only enterprise-grade cloud management platform, today announced Agility Platform 9.1 with new capabilities to help expand DevOps and hybrid cloud implementations in Global 2000 enterprises. ServiceMesh's Agility Platform 9.1 accelerates the adoption of cloud-based IT operating models by providing broader hybrid cloud support, expanding DevOps to more diverse applications and use cases, and minimizing the complexity of deploying multi-tier applications and platforms across heterogeneous private and public clouds.  By accelerating the adoption of the Cloud Empowered Enterprise™, Agility Platform makes it possible for large, global organizations in highly regulated industries to increase agility and innovation, control IT costs, and drive vendor contestability using a self service, on-demand IT service delivery model.  

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130220/SF62770LOGO)

"Enterprises are under increasing pressure to speed the time to market for new applications and services. DevOps and hybrid cloud are important initiatives for IT organizations seeking greater agility and the ability to deliver new business capabilities to market faster," says Torsten Volk, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Management Associates.  "Cloud management platforms that can orchestrate and automate complex application deployments across hybrid clouds, enable application release automation for DevOps, and provide extensible policy-based governance and security controls help address this critical enterprise need to increase the pace of innovation."

"Software developers don't want to fill out a help desk request, nor will they tolerate a lengthy approvals process to get access to cloud resources," said Dave Bartoletti, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. "Developers turn to hybrid cloud management platforms for automation because these tools aim squarely at simplifying their lives. From unified dashboards, they simplify application design via reusable templates and blueprints and offer push-button deployment to multiple clouds. They automate configuration, scaling, and recovery operations and consolidate multiple cloud accounts, users, and roles in a common framework that hides infrastructure complexities. In short, they bring order to the chaos of multi-cloud management without limiting developer productivity."

"As an enterprise-grade CMP vendor, ServiceMesh implementations are appealing to large-scale enterprises because they can increase transparency, reduce cloud deployment costs, and provide secure and compliant self-service automation for multiple cloud deployments," said Brian Ott, Vice President at Cloud Technology Partners. "CMP solutions that automate application releases, have capable policy engines and support multiple clouds can deliver a compelling value proposition for enterprise IT."

"Many enterprises have fallen victim to the pitfalls of single-vendor sourcing over the years," said Eric Pulier, ServiceMesh CEO.  "This model usually develops serious drawbacks, such as locking IT into inflexible contracts and slowing the pace of innovation to dangerous levels.  To help break that cycle in the cloud era, enterprises need a cloud management platform that levels the playing field by enabling vendor contestability across a wide range of public, private and cloud services. Support for multi-vendor private clouds including VMware, Microsoft and OpenStack, along with a growing assortment of public cloud offerings, fosters greater agility, cost savings, and competitive advantage."

Agility Platform 9.1

ServiceMesh's Agility Platform 9.1 introduces a range of new capabilities to accelerate the adoption of cloud-based IT operating models and DevOps within large enterprises. New Agility Platform 9.1 features include:

• Expanded cloud support for additional OpenStack implementations. Agility Platform 9.1 expands support to additional OpenStack implementations including Folsum, Grizzly, and other public cloud implementations to meet growing interest and demand for OpenStack within the enterprise.
• New Command Line Interface (CLI) rapidly enables DevOps tool chain integration and support. Agility Platform 9.1 provides a CLI for rapid tool chain integration using command line scripts instead of the Agility Platform API. In addition, technical users can employ the CLI to instruct the Agility Platform to execute a wide range of commands and functions from the convenience of a command line tool rather than through the Agility Platform graphical web interface.
• Industry's first native support for WinRM and PowerShell. Enterprise customers require robust operational security and reliability, but often have to settle for less secure remote access and execution tools for Windows-based virtual machines such as SSH and CygWin. Agility Platform 9.1 is the industry's first cloud management platform to offer native support for WinRM and PowerShell for Windows virtual machines, offering enterprise-grade security and reliability with a Microsoft-supported technology solution.
• Self-updating application blueprints and templates. Cloud-based applications and platforms are based on underlying virtual machine designs that can change based on updates or patches to operating systems, utilities, agents, scripts, and other software packages. In Agility Platform 9.1, when a change is made to an underlying design component, it can be automatically updated to all the dependent templates and application blueprints that rely on it. This helps reduce support costs, eliminate configuration drift, and enforce standards compliance across the enterprise. 
• Expanded workload auto-scaling options.  Agility Platform 9.1 now provides the option to automatically scale workloads to meet changing demand by resizing resources allocated to an existing instance, such as increasing CPU or memory allocation.  This is especially useful when end users accidentally over- or under-provision IT resources for their workload as it allows the Agility Platform to enforce policies to automatically optimize resource consumption based on usage.  This new functionality complements existing Agility Platform capabilities to horizontally scale cloud workloads by monitoring multiple user-specified performance thresholds and automatically deploying new instances in a workload pool.
• Single sign-on and expanded identity management support with SAML. The Agility Platform has always supported popular identity management systems like Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP, and has expanded this with support for SAML 2.0, providing the convenience of single sign-on for end users across a wide variety of applications and systems.

Application Release Automation and DevOps Initiatives
DevOps initiatives allow organizations to increase the speed and frequency of software releases, and Agility Platform 9.1 provides new capabilities to expand the benefits of DevOps and application release automation to a growing number of application teams and software development tool chains. These capabilities build upon Agility Platform's unique application-centric policy controls to enforce consistent and fully governed application deployment environments across the software development lifecycle to minimize configuration mis-matches, defects and improve production software quality. 

Operationalizing heterogeneous, hybrid clouds
Business agility includes balancing cost/performance options, including selection of the optimal cloud vendor to address a specific application's service levels, cost, location, and other workload requirements.  Hybrid cloud models embody this flexibility in choice.  Agility Platform 9.1 expands the hybrid cloud deployment options available to enterprise IT, while providing a unified management and governance framework that integrates with a broad ecosystem of internal IT systems and tools.

About ServiceMesh
ServiceMesh provides the industry's only enterprise-grade cloud management platform that enables on-demand, self-service IT operating models for the Cloud Empowered Enterprise™. Enterprise customers select the ServiceMesh Agility Platform to automate the deployment and management of enterprise applications, platforms, and infrastructure across private, public and hybrid cloud environments. The Agility Platform provides a single, integrated control point for governance, compliance and security across the customer's cloud applications and environments, empowering the business with fully governed, self-service access to applications, platforms, and services. Some of the world's largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care and other highly regulated industries rely on ServiceMesh to deliver applications and services at the speed of market change, streamline bureaucratic and inefficient IT operating models and transform IT into a strategic business enabler and competitive advantage. To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com. @servicemesh

CONTACT: Tamarie Johnson, 503-345-9257, [email protected]

SOURCE ServiceMesh