From AnthillPro to UrbanCode DevOps Platform
There's no doubt that we will be asked this question many times. The frank answer is that there are many reasons why we feel that this is the next big step for Urbancode and for the DevOps market. We can take a look at the evolution of the market and see that given our leading position in the market place, this is the next logical move. We can also base this decision on what we know about how our customers use our products. Below is a little more insight into our thought process.
Evolution of the Market
2001 – AnthillOS introduced as an open-source build management server.
2002 – AnthillPro 2.x introduced as a commercial build management server offering.
2005 – AnthillPro 3.0 introduced. This 3rd generation product brought with it many innovations that in 2005 were ahead of their time. For example, AnthillPro 3.x took a holistic view of the software delivery process and thus added value beyond build automation. Users of AnthillPro 3.x were about to automate the deployment of their software across many servers. Also, users were able to manage promotions of software across environments; for example, once a BuildLife was approved in SIT, it could be promoted to UAT, and then eventually to PROD.
2007 – Build market started to mature. Lower-end offerings started to enter the market focusing on providing solutions that are "good enough" at the team level. Enterprise players were pushed up-market: providing solutions for more complex build management problems and providing solutions with enterprise scalability.
2010 – Market adopts vision behind AnthillPro 3.x. First, "continuous deployment" made an intriguing splash promoting automated production deployments multiple times per day. Then, "continuous delivery" was presented in a book promoting many of the concepts behind AnthillPro 3.x.
Our analysis of the market revealed that there is a big gap in the market as there are no players that provide a true end-to-end DevOps platform. This "true" DevOps platform needs to provide a solution to the Application Development teams as well as a solution catered to the Operations and Release Management teams. That is exactly what we are offering with the Urbancode DevOps Platform.
Different Usage Scenarios for AnthillPro
We've known for some time that AnthillPro customers and users fall into several categories:
- Those that use AnthillPro to manage complex and/or enterprise-scale, centralized build management services.
- Those that use AnthillPro to automate and manage multi-tier application deployments across hundreds or thousands of servers.
- Those that utilize AnthillPro to provide visibility into, and aggregate data about, Releases.
AnthillPro Brand Tied to Build Management
We've also noticed that the AnthillPro brand, while very strong, is tied in people's minds to Build Management. This is perhaps not surprising given that the roots of the product are in Build Management and given that the name is closely associated with the Java build tool ANT. We even catch members of our own team referring to AnthillPro as a "build management server." But, this is problematic given that AnthillPro delivers value beyond build management.
Products Tailored to Their Users
Given the above observations about the uses of AnthillPro and the continual drive to deliver more and more value to our users, we have decided that it's time to split AnthillPro along the lines demarcating different users and usage scenarios. For the Application Development teams, we have the uBuild product. For the Operations Management, Middleware Engineering, and Release teams, we have uDeploy.
Having a single product that caters to users in all three of the above categories has become difficult. Increasingly, there are times when a specific feature would be very beneficial for one of the usage categories but not others. Adding such a feature to the product would provide value to one category of users while making the product more complex for the remaining users.
Having separate products that cater to a specific group of users and usage scenarios allows us to make these products easier to use, more flexible, and much more powerful.
