ServiceMesh Announces Agility Platform 9.0 to Accelerate the Application Delivery Lifecycle Through Cloud Computing

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Feb. 20, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- ServiceMesh, provider of the industry's only enterprise-grade cloud management platform, today announced Agility Platform 9.0, a solution that enables unprecedented governance and management of cloud-based IT service portfolios for Global 2000 enterprises. Agility Platform 9.0 extends the feature-rich cloud management platform's ability to help organizations realize the strategic benefits of cloud computing by enabling them to accelerate the release and deployment of applications onto private, public or hybrid clouds while governing their deployment, orchestration, and configuration with extensible policy controls. With these new enhancements, Agility Platform allows Global 2000 customers to further accelerate the pace and frequency of their software releases, enabling business application owners to respond to new opportunities at the speed of market change.

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"Applications need to be built and released on faster and faster cycles, and as a result DevOps - the combination of development and operational skills that came out of the Agile programming movement - is being used more and more to take enterprise IT organizations into the cloud," said Rachel Chalmers, vice president at 451 Research. "A cloud management platform can help such enterprises speed their applications to production if it has features for application release automation, real-time configuration management and application-centric governance policies to address these common bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle."

"With the increasing alignment of DevOps to cloud IT transformation initiatives, the strategic importance of accelerating the application lifecycle is becoming increasingly clear to IT organizations," said Shawn Douglass, CTO, ServiceMesh. "In fact, mature organizations are using Cloud Management Platforms like ServiceMesh Agility Platform 9.0 to accelerate the application lifecycle, benefiting the organization with increased agility, faster time to innovation and first mover status resulting in direct business benefit."

Agility Platform 9.0
ServiceMesh's Agility Platform 9.0 accelerates application releases across stages in the software development lifecycle with comprehensive controls over governance, security, and configuration management. Agility Platform includes unique application level configuration management capabilities, a new graphical application Blueprint Designer, an enhanced service catalog store, policy-based storage management, and expanded cloud support including a new cloud software development kit (SDK). 

• Application-level configuration management allows IT to continuously monitor cloud applications and application platforms for configurations that are out of compliance and automatically remediate configuration changes with policy-driven governance including enforcing remediation action via integration with Puppet Labs.  This is a first in the industry, as existing automated configuration management solutions traditionally do not extend beyond the operating system level. With the ServiceMesh Agility Platform and Puppet Labs, enterprises can now enforce configuration compliance policies on operating systems, middleware stacks and the application artifacts themselves, across different stages in the application lifecycle and all associated cloud environments.
• Graphical application blueprints help organizations increase standardization of applications and platforms across the enterprise, and facilitate moving more sophisticated multi-tier platform and applications to the cloud.  Agility Platform Blueprints simplify the design and deployment of complex multi-tier applications and platforms using a drag-and-drop graphical editor. Agility Platform allows enterprises to model complex, cloud-portable applications and platforms and optimize deployment decisions including detailed "what if" scenarios based on real-time cost and resource capacity information. Application blueprints developed with the Agility Platform are independent of the underlying cloud API or hypervisor and thus deployment of these cloud-portable applications can be optimized based on policy controls at deploy time. 
• More powerful, easy to use service catalog store that provides greater cost visibility and usability. With Agility Platform 9.0, a broader user community can browse, order, and consume IT resources.  Helping realize IT's Everything-as-a-Service goal including support for mobile applications, end users can now access the Agility Platform store from their mobile device. In addition, Agility Platform 9.0 also provides detailed cost visibility to consumers.
• Policy-driven storage tiering allows IT to leverage policies to automatically select the best storage resource at deployment.
• Expanded cloud support with new SDK that allows ServiceMesh customers and partners to create their own integrations beyond the cloud providers natively supported today.  In addition, Agility Platform 9.0 has expanded its support for Microsoft® Azure IaaS, VMware vSphere® 5.1 and VMware vCloud® Director™ 5.1. Customers and partners can use the ServiceMesh toolkit to build their own adapters for bare metal provisioning, realizing the full benefits of policy-based governance in a single architectural control point. 

Accelerate Application Releases and DevOps Initiatives
Application blueprints and configuration management combine in the Agility Platform 9.0 to bring full-featured application lifecycle orchestration to enterprise IT. These capabilities work together to speed application releases and adoption of DevOps methodologies while ensuring consistency and enforcement of Standard Operating Environments (SOEs) to minimize downstream defects and errors across the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Agility Platform 9.0 helps organizations realize the benefits of DevOps, removing bottlenecks to accelerate the pace and frequency of software releases.

Cloud Governance and Configuration Management
With this release, ServiceMesh has extended its integration with Puppet Labs, increasing the Agility Platform's ability to deploy a wide range of middleware solutions and enforce application-level compliance policy across the SDLC. With the Agility Platform, enterprise development teams can innovate more efficiently in support of the business, while governance, compliance and security policies are enforced. The Agility Platform monitors application and platform configurations for change, ensuring they are continuously compliant with business policy. Should a configuration change occur, Agility Platform 9.0 can capture and remediate it on the fly, in accordance with pre-defined business objectives. It can also be integrated with CMDB and ticketing systems, ensuring the organization's change policy and procedures. In addition, the Agility Platform now integrates application context into its remediation engine, looking at elements such as what security zone an application is in, which helps direct specific remediation steps.  

About ServiceMesh
ServiceMesh provides the industry's only enterprise-grade cloud management platform that enables on-demand, self-service IT operating models for Global 2000 clients. Enterprise customers select the ServiceMesh Agility Platform to automate the deployment and management of enterprise applications and platforms across private, public and hybrid cloud environments. The Agility Platform provides a single, integrated control point for governance, compliance and security across the customer's cloud applications and environments, empowering the business with fully governed, self-service access to applications, platforms, and services. Some of the world's largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care and other highly regulated industries rely on ServiceMesh to deliver applications and services at the speed of market change, streamline bureaucratic and inefficient IT operating models and transform IT into a strategic business enabler and competitive advantage. To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com. @servicemesh

Contact:
Kim Blomgren
503-914-5959
[email protected]

SOURCE ServiceMesh