CloudBees Named 'Strong Performer' in the 2015 Forrester Wave for Application Release Automation

Forrester Research , a respected industry analyst, recently completed a comprehensive study of key vendors participating in the Application Release Automation (ARA) market. These findings were published today as part of the first ever “Forrester ARA Wave” (see below for a link to download this fantastic resource!)
Overall, there were 7 vendors in the study, including a few industry behemoths and some nimble, up-and-coming players. Because CloudBees is already broadly recognized as a leader in enterprise Continuous Delivery and DevOps, Forrester invited us to participate.
Even though our ARA solution is one of the newer ones on the market, it is based on a proven, hardened automation platform being used every day by industry leaders like Qualcomm, Lockheed Martin, Huawei, Cisco, GE, Gap and E*TRADE to boost DevOps productivity and Agile throughput.
Our strategy of extending our single end-to-end automation solution to provide DevOps teams shared control and visibility for additional use cases is working, and we are extremely pleased with our strong showing in this inaugural ARA Wave. This achievement, along with a number of recent competitive wins, validates the investment we have made across our entire organization to help customers solve the end-to-end software delivery problems organizations face today.

Highest Ranking for ‘Strategy’

“Helping the world deliver better software faster” is more than just a slogan for us, it is a way of life. We received highest ranking by far for ‘Strategy’ across all the participating vendors. This underscores our commitment to – and leadership in – the future of this important new space. Interestingly, the Forrester “Strategy” category also includes characteristics of product extensibility, controllability, and scalability – already areas of key strength for us and of great importance to the large enterprises we serve.
When coupled with our aggressive 60-day feature release cycle, we are rapidly executing on that strategy by adding more valuable features to the product, and are putting them into the hands of customers at an amazing pace.

CloudBees Flow a ‘Strong Performer’ in the Market

Placed overall as a ‘Strong Performer’ within the Forrester ARA Wave, our new ARA solution has quickly arrived in the same category as some other ARA vendors. What many of them don’t have, and what helped us accelerate into this position so quickly, is our single, powerful and end-to-end automation platform that can be extended in any direction to solve the most complex of use cases – including ARA.

Taking Charge in 2015

While our results within Forrester ARA Wave are extremely fulfilling, we can’t help but notice that no vendor was placed in the “Leaders” category, and so we have set our sights on firmly establishing ourselves there next year. We will do this by pushing the boundaries of ARA with new features and products to tackle even more critical use cases.
We're off to a great start already. Forrester reviewed CloudBees Flow 5.3 for the ARA Wave, however our latest 5.4 release is hitting the streets now. With full support for managing cloud resources, DSL authoring and parameterization of deploy processes, we’ve made another great stride forward in the evolution of our leading ARA solution.
As we look ahead, we'll be taking a fresh look at what ‘application release’ means with an upcoming release management and planning tool that may just change the way teams think about their approach to this age-old problem. Templates, re-usable objects, and granular layers of automation will also allow customers to get up and running faster, be more agile in the face of change, and maintain greater control and visibility over their end-to-end software delivery process.
As we tie it all together with native integration into cloud platforms (from AWS EC2 to VMWare VCloudAir), containers (from Docker to Rocket) and configuration management tools (from Chef to SaltStack), CloudBees enables customers to quickly strike the right balance of out-of-the-box functionality and customized flexibility to solve their most complex software delivery problems.
We look forward to continuing a great year in 2015 and are proud to be recognized by Forrester ARA Wave as a Strong Performer in the DevOps (r)evolution. We also wish to congratulate the other participants in this year’s Wave, all of whom contribute to the overall community of learning and tooling that make this ecosystem more diverse, and competitive.

Download your copy of the Forrester Wave for Application Release Automation »