A faster way to evaluate DevOps software

Evaluating enterprise software can be a pain. Until you use the software yourself, it’s tough to understand if and how a tool will work for your organization. In most cases, to fully explore enterprise software you need to work with a technical sales team to configure and install a sample environment and train decision makers on how to use it. After months of emails, approvals, phone calls, and meetings, you might be no closer to making a decision about software your organization desperately needs to advance its DevOps journey.

In a recent TechStrong TV interview, HCLSoftware DevOps’ Al Wagner spoke with Accelerated Strategies Group’s Mitch Ashley about this problem. Al has consulted on DevOps transformation for nearly a decade, and has worked in tech for 20 years, so he’s very familiar with the enterprise software evaluation journey.

“When organizations are experimenting with new tools, there’s that runway of getting that environment provisioned, testing a mode, and running a pilot to see if they’re a fit before they make that long-term commitment,” Al said. “Time is money and it can take a considerable amount of time to line up some of these tools and configure them and integrate them so they are ready for use.”

So what’s the solution? HCL SoFy! “SoFy” is actually short for “Solution Factory” and is a cloud-native catalog of containerized HCLSoftware solutions. Al explained how HCL SoFy works.

“You can explore the catalog, pick the different solutions as part of something that you want to try, and create a SoFy solution. Once you create that SoFy solution, it builds a custom Helm chart that provides all of the details including some monitoring and some custom access control capabilities on how to deploy it in your local environment or how to deploy the solution. Within the SoFy interface, you can click a button to deploy one of the HCL solutions into our Google Cloud platform or you can download that Helm chart and deploy it into a Kubernetes environment of your choosing.”

In other words, you can have an environment configured and running in just minutes! Go to HCL SoFy, pick the DevOps software solutions you want to try, then deploy the solution.

But what if you don’t have data or an environment you can use to test this software?

“For those who want to test things out, we have accelerators in the form of demo docs that will automatically configure the products with data and provide hands-on workbook-type exercises covering many use cases that organizations will encounter as they begin their journey,” Al said. “It’s not a production environment but it certainly is an environment where I can try things out and if I wanted to move it into production I can download that Helm chart and install it in my environment.”

Anyone can request access to HCL SoFy, then download free trials of HCLSoftware’s continuous delivery, issue tracking, test automation, and value stream management software within minutes – no more waiting months and jumping through hoops to test out enterprise software.

“When you install new software, even for that test or that exploratory type of activity, there’s the installation, there’s the administration, there’s the configuration,” Al said. “That can be a huge time sink or a very frustrating activity where you don’t truly see the power of the tool. So by us automating all of those pieces as part of that solution deployment, we’re going from nothing to something in a matter of minutes and it’s a working environment.”

Watch the full TechStrong TV interview below. Ready to speed up your DevOps tool evaluation with HCL SoFy? Email us at DevOpsInfo@hcl.com or you can email Al Wagner directly at Allan.Wagner@hcl.com.

DevOps Tools – Al Wagner, HCLSoftware from Digital Anarchist Network on Vimeo.