If you followed the news from Cloudforce today, you may have witnessed an historic moment.
I am talking about the joint announcement that Salesforce and CA are bringing traditional IT silos together in a truly collaborative environment.
Most IT shops still consist of the same departments that made sense 20 years ago: development, operations, support and more recently a PMO (project management office), trying to somehow connect these together into a predictable and manageable process.
As discussed earlier on this blog, most of today's development happens using agile methodologies like Scrum, but the rest of the organization still operates much in a traditional fashion. And if only one link in the IT supply chain is agile, the total is still pretty ... traditional.
What CA's Helge Scheil and Simon Grice showed during a short demo during Marc Bienoff's (Salesforce) keynote was CA's Agile Vision. Part of CA's Portfolio Management for Agile IT, which combines agile development planning and management with enterprise project planning and deployment. CA's Agile Vision leverages Salesforce's chatter for seamless collaboration across teams and departments and runs on the Force.com cloud platform. In fact, Agile Vision is based on the solution Salesforce used for years to manage the (agile) development of their market leading cloud platform internally.
But the announcement went beyond showing that CA Agile Vision is an easy to use and highly interactive cloud based application for managing agile developments, with integrated support for starting sprints and gathering feedback in the development area. The combination of agile planning with a cloud platform such as force.com enables not only fast development, but also fast deployment of the developed applications. It is bridging the gap often referred to as DevOps, the area (or no man's land) between development and operations.
As an independent management solutions provider CA technologies of course offers this capability not just for companies developing for deployment on Force.com. CA's cloud solutions can also deploy onto many other cloud infrastructures, giving similar integration and collaboration advantages between these traditionally silo'd departments.
Agility is a prerequisite for modern companies to survive in today's rapidly changing marketplaces, but not at the cost of quality, scalability or reliability. That is why it is so important that with the introduction of agility into the operational parts of the organization we do not compromise these other requirements. Cloud computing is making this possible, both in development and operations.