For the third year in a row, Gartner, has positioned CloudBees as a leader in their Magic Quadrant for Application Release Orchestration (ARO)*. We are (understandably) pleased and honored! Gartner subscribers use the MQ to assess the performance of various solutions using an easy-to-read chart that highlights the relative strength of a company’s product vision, as well as their ability to execute on that vision. 
Gartner’s highly sought-after 2018 Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities for ARO considered vendors based on a minimum of three product-related functions, namely 1) Deployment Automation 2) Pipeline and Environment Management and 3) Release Orchestration.
From Automation to Orchestration
Many will note that last year’s MQ was squarely focused on Application Release Automation . This year, Gartner expanded the scope of focus from Automation to Orchestration as a key enabler to better, safer software delivery. "Most DevOps initiatives focus on leveraging automation, often in technology siloes; while the overall goal of a true DevOps implementation includes an integrated toolchain," wrote George Spafford and Ian Head in a recent Gartner research report. “This enables a plug-and-play approach to evaluating and selecting tools so that each tool can be loosely coupled to its adjacent tool in the application life cycle. Linking all of the automation touchpoints and information flows will speed the movement of releases through the toolchain, while reducing errors, defects, rework and outages.”**
CloudBees Flow Positioned Furthest for Completeness of Vision
This year, as in years’ past, CloudBees Flow was positioned the highest on the “Completeness of Vision” axis of the Gartner ARO MQ. This points to our commitment to – and leadership in – the future of this increasingly important space. It’s interesting to note that the ARO MQ process is a long one (it kicked off in March this year), and since we submitted our application to participate, we’ve been busy on the innovation front! We continue on a 60-day release schedule and have recently announced additional improvements that (we believe) will propel us even farther to the right in next year’s ARO MQ, specifically:
DevOps Foresight , a predictive analytics solution that provides actionable analytics and recommendations to optimize release pipelines
Lift and Shift capabilities to easily containerize monolithic applications
Microservices Discovery capabilities that finds services in Kubernetes and creates ready-to-deploy Microservices models and Environments.
A Release Portfolio view to manage and visualize complex release trains
A SmartMap view to visualize the relationships between containerized applications, the infrastructure they run on, and the applications they make up
A Release Plan vs. Actual view to plan, schedule and track releases with precision
A Unified Release and Environment Calendar to identify and manage conflicts
And more…
As we look to the future, we’ll be making our powerful solution even more simple to use with powerful, persona-specific dashboards and other UX changes. With more plugins and templates to make centralized, self-service CD even easier to manage, we will help 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.
Furthest for Vision PLUS Top Scores for Today
In conjunction with the MQ, every year Gartner publishes another, related document outlining the Critical Capabilities (CC) that people need in order to be successful, TODAY, with ARO. I’m pleased to report that CloudBees also has the HIGHEST scores across all three personas Gartner tracks, namely:
Release Manager Use Case (4.9 out of 5)
Application/Product Owner (4.88 out of 5)
DevOps/Application Team Member (4.84 out of 5)
It’s all about our Customers
One of the most gratifying aspects of the Gartner process is collecting and seeing the objective customer feedback given during anonymous surveys and interviews. We continue to be thankful for all of the customers who took the time to speak with and answer Gartner’s questions. Gartner makes the information publicly available for anyone to view -- you can see all of these posts yourself! 
(Figures 1, 2, 3: Excerpted from Gartner PeerInsight website )
In addition to accolades from customers and key analysts like Gartner, we are also noticing significant traction in the market. In Q2, we reported a whopping 220% growth year over year , and the momentum hasn’t slowed down… we recently registered many competitive wins at some of the biggest companies in the world – especially in heavily regulated industries like Financial Services, High-tech Manufacturing, and Automotive. Our ability to help customers:
get started quickly with our solution (TIAA was up and running in a self-sufficient manner in just two weeks!),
adapt to, and gain visibility into their evolving business/process/tooling landscape (AdvancedMD used to struggle to create government healthcare compliance reports, now they can do it with one click of a button)
and do so reliably and safely at scale (A major financial services firm is ramping up CloudBees Flow from one business unit to all five, encompassing over 300 applications and 5000 releases per month)
** …seems to be resonating both with organizations who have never had any ARO solution as well as with those organizations who are outgrowing their “1.0” solutions and are now looking for something more modern, flexible, and scalable. We are proud to be recognized by Gartner as a leader in the ARO MQ for the third year in a row. This achievement, along with an increasing number of 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. We also wish to congratulate the other participants in the Gartner ARO MQ, all of whom contribute to the overall community of learning and tooling that make this ecosystem more diverse, and competitive. For more information about CloudBees Flow and to download the free Community Edition, please visit <http://electric-cloud.com/products/CloudBees Flow> . *Gartner, DevOps — Eight Simple Steps to Get It Right, October 2017 **Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Application Release Orchestration, September, 2018 This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from here. Gartner Disclaimer** Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose