– Jason Liu, CEO of UC4 (www.uc4.com), says:

According to Gartner, over the next four years, 25 percent of large IT organizations that develop custom applications will establish release teams that span application development and production and are focused on continuous delivery. With some release processes having as many as 400 different automation tasks, an ARA tool adds reliability to the deployment process– with less custom scripting and by documenting variations across environments to reduce configuration errors and downtime.

UC4, the largest independent IT Process Automation software provider, continues its momentum and solidifies a strategic growth area with the acquisition of Ventum, a software provider specializing in application release management. Application Release Automation (ARA) will be a focal point for UC4 going forward given the market’s expansion prospects and UC4’s now industry-leading product. It enables IT and application development organizations to combine agility with central management, security, and control.

UC4’s ONE Automation platform is well suited to address the growing demand for application release automation accelerated by new technologies and models such as cloud and virtualization. With the acquisition of Ventum, UC4 now has an end-to-end solution that unifies the application release process with operational IT process automation in the datacenter. The UC4 automation engine provides a seamless way to deploy and maintain applications and their infrastructure.

Ventum’s enterprise release management software adds key capabilities to UC4’s solution:

  • 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

Already integrated with UC4’s Application Release Automation, Ventum’s solution enables release managers to initiate a deployment using UC4’s automation engine from within Ventum’s user interface. Tighter integration is currently being developed to provide even greater efficiencies and cost savings.