| | June 201519CIOReview20 MOST PROMISINGDevOpsSOLUTION PROVIDERS - 2015 From a business perspective, DevOps is a means to an end characterized by aligning development and operations roles and processes to align business objectives, improve quality and accelerate time to market.To achieve these business objectives, organizations require a culture that enables collaboration and understanding between the functional groups that deliver IT services. Headquartered in Kyiv, Ukraine, Ciklum utilizes their 13+ years of business, software development and agile DevOps consulting expertise to help organizations gain control over IT applications and processes, derive value from existing resources and scale."By coupling expert insight with the proper tools and skilled engineers, Ciklum enables teams to identify and mitigate bottlenecks in the software delivery pipeline; bridging the gap between software development and operations teams," says Christian Aaen, CTO, Ciklum.In recent years, a host of next-generation process and engineering tools, in addition to operating system-level virtualization techniques, have been introduced in the market to help organizations improve software deployment processes. Ciklum's experts do not treat DevOps as an isolated discipline but engage and train client teams through the entire delivery process to seamlessly integrate these tools and processes into existing infrastructure, accelerating throughput of their development organizations. To compliment their existing offering, Ciklum has introduced its own, in-house technical quality and performance management analytics tool, Metrix. Its integrated structure was built using open source tools that continuously analyze, benchmark and highlight code quality and development team performance--critical components in any lean development organization with ambitions of doing frequent software releases.A high level of automation allows constant non-intrusive monitoring of quality code and builds--paramount when a company is releasing frequently to production. Poor quality deployments result in missed opportunities, revenue loss, dissatisfied users and sometimes even complete product failure. Metrix uses multi-factor scoring algorithms and benchmarking versus Ciklum's data foundation to detect and predict software quality, developer performance and team performance issues. Supported technology stacks include (but not limited to) Java, .NET, PHP, RoR, Pytoon, iOS, Android and JavaScript."As a software development service provider, we support our client engagements with this data; data that can be consumed, understood and analyzed by a variety of client stakeholders. This leads to open and constructive conversation about opportunities and constraints--and consequently supports educated decisions around scope, cost and timing," explains Aaen. "Ultimately, it helps us provide a better service and take a stake in co-creating great software platforms and products with our clients." One of Ciklum's clients in the travel industry was challenged by the increasing disruption in their market caused by online competitors--namely price comparison engines that have pushed the market towards price being the main competitive factor. Countering that, travel operators have started focusing a lot more on the customer journey and seek to build customer loyalty via great, easy and personalized customer experiences."To re-purpose typically B2B oriented systems architecture and improve direction connection with consumers, incumbent travel operators must adjust their systems landscape and organizational structure into a leaner model through which they continuously can drive improvements to the digital customer journey, shorten the customer feedback loop, analyze the feedback and respond fast," says Aaen. Ciklum helped the client transform their end-to-end delivery capability into a leaner structure, significantly shortening the time-to-market of new digital initiatives.For the days to come, Ciklum is continuously expanding its infrastructure and engineering tool suite for efficient product delivery. "We are always working on solutions that enable us to provide more value to our partners and expand our market reach," concludes Aaen.CiklumImproving Speed to Market by Integrating Development and Operations DisciplinesChristian AaenDevOps, the means to an end--if you are doing it right"
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