Enabling Enterprises to Deliver Better Software Faster: Electric Cloud

"In a world where IT is struggling to keep up and release software at the rate that the business demands – Electric Cloud makes software releases safe, fast and routine.”

In today’s digital age, much of the business innovation is driven by software. To win, serve and retain their customers, organizations are being tasked with releasing software updates at an increasingly faster pace. The maturity, speed, and quality of a company’s software release processes have become a key differentiator and a competitive advantage for businesses today. To remain competitive, companies are investing in DevOps and Application Release Automation (ARA) to become better at releasing software – supporting greater velocity and agility, while mitigating the risk of software releases.

Founded in 2002, Electric Cloud has been helping large enterprises for over a decade now reap the benefits of DevOps, by automating and accelerating software delivery pipelines at scale. The company offers a DevOps platform that is essential to its customers in delivering their own software innovation to market. ElectricFlow, the company’s end-to-end DevOps Release Automation platform has recently been named the leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Application Release Automation – getting the highest scores for both vision and execution.

The product that paints transformation
The ElectricFlow platform is proven at extreme enterprise workloads, and is used by some of the largest organizations in the world to transform their software releases from a laborious, slow, risky and painful process – to a competitive advantage. “ElectricFlow addresses the needs of large enterprises around application release – enabling them to deliver software innovation faster while still ensuring quality, security, compliance and control,” says Steve Brodie. ElectricFlow orchestrates and automates the entire software delivery pipeline – from developer check-in of the code, through testing, deploying to various environments, all the way through to a successful Release into Production. By allowing customers to plug in all the point-tools, environments and processes involved in their delivery process, ElectricFlow enables organizations to orchestrate the entire end-to-end pipeline, achieve visibility, compliance and control over the entire release process. Furthermore, it boasts robust deployment automation and release management capabilities- such as “Smart Deploy”, and the industry-first push-button “Rolling Deployments”.

What makes Enterprises choose ElectricFlow?
ElectricFlow gives Operations, and the organization, confidence as code is promoted into later stages in the lifecycle and also provides for security access controls, easy auditability, approval gateways and visibility into the entire release process. The tight integration between the various processes and tools eliminates manual handoffs (or “silos of automation”) to speed cycle times, and improve product quality and resource utilization. With ElectricFlow, enterprises can now normalize their “Pathways to Production as much as possible across the organization, to allow faster feedback loops and reusability across teams, while supporting the specific needs of different variants of the application.” The ability to have a consistent build, test and deployment processes that everyone benefits from is the “Holy Grail for enterprises as they take the next step in their DevOps adoption towards scaling DevOps in the organization”, says Brodie. By standardizing on ElectricFlow to manage their tools and processes across the organization, enterprises not only eliminate configuration drift, bottlenecks in the pipeline,etc. but also save on operational cost and management overhead.

ElectricFlow benefits to clients exposed
Leading organizations such as E*TRADE, GAP, GE, HP, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Fortune 20 banks, Cisco, Qualcomm, and others, use Electric Cloud’s solutions to release their applications to market – boosting DevOps productivity and Agile throughput, while providing a safe, scalable, auditable, Pathway to Production. Electric Cloud enabled E*Trade to plug-in their entire tool chain into ElectricFlow and automate their end-to-end pipeline to achieve 12X faster delivery rates, while GAP inc. achieved a 92% faster delivery with ElectricFlow. GE Healthcare achieved 75 percent improved infrastructure utilization and Lockheed Martin achieved 90X faster auditability, with the platform’s automation easily producing their one-click audit trail whenever they had to issue a compliance report.

Growing popularity
Electric Cloud’s clientele is growing exponentially as more organizations from financial services, government and retail embrace DevOps practices to transform their IT and accelerate software delivery. Some of Electric Cloud’s customers use ElectricFlow to serve over 40,000 developers using the solution for build/test. Some use it to deploy more than 20,000 applications while others are doing more than 10,000 product releases per year, 100,000 builds per day, 1 million integration tests per year, or hundreds of millions of test cases per day. Being the only end-to-end DevOps platform proven at such demanding enterprise scale, as well as being established as a Leader in the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for ARA, are some of the reasons for the company’s rise in fame.

Future-ready
The extreme scalability of ElectricFlow goes hand-in hand with the platform’s flexibility and extensibility -allowing customers to plug-in any new technology stack, tool or processes as the need arise. This enables organizations to support what Gartner has labeled “bi-modal IT”- both traditional release practices and legacy apps (that are often more complex, and require coordination of many inter-dependent components/environments), as well as more ‘modern’ container/microservices architectures and Continuous Delivery pipelines.

By providing centralized management and visibility of the entire software delivery pipeline–no matter how complex–ElectricFlow improves developer productivity and time-to-market, while streamlining operations, lowering costs, and eliminating the risk of failed releases.

Leadership at Electric Cloud

Steve Brodie, CEO – Steve has over 25 years of experience as a leader in the enterprise software industry, introducing new technologies to the market for both venture-backed startups and leading enterprise IT organizations. Prior to joining Electric Cloud, Steve was Group Vice President and General Manager of the Application Lifecycle Management Business Unit at Serena Software, where he spearheaded the Orchestrated ALM strategy as well as the company’s entry and growth in release management, a cornerstone technology for DevOps. Prior to Serena, Steve served as President and Chief Products & Marketing Officer at Skytap, a leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, where he was responsible for delivering the world’s first VMware-based public cloud. He also led the Load Testing and Application Performance Management product teams at HP/Mercury Interactive and previously held senior product management positions at IBM/Rational. Steve holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is a graduate of the executive management program at the University of Washington.