On Wednesday, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced the general availability ALM Octane, its cloud-based application lifecycle management offering that is geared towards making customers’ DevOps processes more efficient.

The platform makes use of common toolsets and frameworks, such as Jenkins, GIT, and Gherkin, while also providing insights to developers and application testers. This could potentially help enterprises deliver those applications more quickly, without having to cut corners in the vetting process.

SEE: UX battle: Enterprise software vs. consumer software (Tech Pro Research)

The increasing digitalization of the workplace means that applications are getting updated almost constantly. The risk of this model is that, in the rush to iterate and redeploy, quality assurance can get lost in the mix.. HPE is hoping that developers using this platform can keep up their pace without giving up proper methods for ensuring quality.

“HPE ALM Octane is specifically designed for Agile and DevOps-ready teams, bringing a cloud-first approach that’s accessible anytime and anywhere, bolstered by big data-style analytics to help deliver speed, quality, and scale across all modes of IT,” said Raffi Margaliot, senior vice president and general manager of application delivery management for HPE.

As noted, HPE ALM Octane is supposed to bridge the gap between traditional and modern application development methods, such as agile, lean, and DevOps. HPE ALM Octane is an inherently open product and leverages REST APIs to accomplish its goals. Additionally, it offers managed, automated testing for developers.

HPE ALM Octane follows the continuous integration process and it also tracks app components to better integrate with chat apps like Slack and Hubot. Also, it utilizes data to give developers a clearer view into the lifecycle of each app.

According to a press release: “HPE ALM Octane provides the ability to leverage big data-style algorithms to provide insight to direct lifecycle activity and decisions, optimizing resource utilization, delivery velocity, and on-going quality.”

Octane will work alongside two existing products, HPE ALM and Quality Center. HPE ALM already offers agile project management and application lifecycle intelligence and management, and Quality Center provides automated testing and developer collaboration. So, it’s not very clear what all Octane will add to the equation just yet.

SEE: HPE ups its enterprise mojo with AppPulse analytics upgrade (TechRepublic)

Alongside the Octane release, HPE updated a few of its other apps, including UFT, LoadRunner, and Performance Center. HPE LeanFT got a whole set of new features such as parallel test execution, JavaScript support, new integrated development environments, and enhancements for testing mobile applications.

The 3 big takeaways for TechRepublic readers

  1. HPE released ALM Octane, an application lifecycle management service that could make it easier and faster for deploy apps, without forgoing testing.
  2. ALM Octane is an open platform, utilizing common toolsets like Jenkins, GIT, and Gherkin, as well as REST APIs.
  3. ALM Octane is one of a host of new products HPE has aimed at app developers targeting organizations pursuing DevOps and agile methodologies, proving the importance of that market to HPE’s strategy.