Automated z/OS development process from Development, through Test and QA to Production

Build your own automated DevOps and Toolchain Orchestration solution

Maximum control, complete insight and end-to-end DevOps Toolchain coverage for your custom software development process.

Development lifecycle automation and devops toolchain orchestration

DevOps for your environment

Be in control of each step of your development process, integrate your existing tools and get end-to-end tool coverage and process insights. Connect your tools and teams, and standardize your workflow using IKAN ALM for DevOps (with CI and CD).

  • Organize and maintain a project in different branches: one for ongoing development, one for current releases and one for maintenance.
  • Assign custom Life Cycles to each project branch: e.g. classical DTAP.
  • Automated Build and Deploy using as many Build, Test and Production levels as you want.
  • Detailed information of Build and Deploy actions, including related tickets (Requirements and Issue Tracking).
  • Approval-based deployments to Test and Production levels
  • Call and use your existing tools on each Build, Test and Production level, run custom tasks (such as database updates,...)
  • Integrations:
    VCR: Git, Subversion, Azure DevOps, Microsoft TFVC, CVS,...

    Issue Tracking: Jira, TFS, Azure DevOps, Github, MicroFocus ALM,...

    View all features...
 
Development lifecycle automation and devops toolchain orchestration

Orchestrate your toolchain

Your software development process has many facets and thus requires many tools. IKAN ALM has the means to orchestrate these tools in a process flow preferred by you.

Your tools are orchestrated from one central place, their outcome is logged, ready for analysis.

All you need to do is enter the related ticket (identifier) from your favorite requirements or issue tracking tool when commiting code.

IKAN ALM will commence the process flow, update the ticket in your requirement or issue tracking tool, and inform you about which builds and deploys the ticket is part of.

Use your IDE of choice; use your VCR of choice; use your Build tool of choice (IKAN ALM, Jenkins,...).

Every following action from this point forward is initiated by IKAN ALM and is fully documented and repeatable.

When you deploy to a test environment or run automated tests, the results will be stored. Following actions are automatically triggered, based on the outcome (Passed or Failed).

For automated tests, use your tool of choice: Selenium, HP ALM,...

Release based or Package based (only a selection) builds are carefully packaged as archives. They are created according to specific deploy environment criteria, so the subsequent deploy step is fail-safe.
Once everything is fully tested and approved you are ready to deploy to production. Deploys can happen on demand, scheduled or automated (continuous deployment).
As part of your deploy process you can use provisioning. For example using a Docker Phase for deployment.

It’s easy to build your own DevOps solution, here’s why

The IKAN ALM phases architecture

Every company has its own approach when it comes to developing software. Processes and tools may vary depending the environment. With IKAN ALM you can build your own DevOps solution any way you like using small building blocks, callled Phases.

Phases are the essential parts which are used to couple the DevOps framework to any development environment. Their task is to call the desired tools in the desired order with the desired parameters.

Phases can be considered as pre-defined, parameter-driven, packaged, reusable script containers.

Phases are responsible for:

  • Executing the actions to automate the DevOps process (or Life Cycle, if you please).
  • Defining the workflow of these processes.

You can automate and control everything you want

IKAN ALM comes with basic functionality (Phases) such as: VCR code retrieval, Code tagging, Issue Tracking integration, Artifact Building and Deploying, Compressing builds results, etc...

For specific environments you can either:

  • Import our Certified pre-made Solution phases (available for: ODI, SAP or z/OS).
  • Write your own Phases (using Ant, Nant, Maven or Gradle).

For any other action (database updates, 3d party tool integration... ) you can also write your own Phases.

Further reading: Using and Developing Custom Phases

IKAN ALM DevOps phases for any environment

See how IKAN ALM works in a common development environment

IKAN ALM introduction video

An introduction to Application Lifecycle Management with IKAN ALM. In this demo we'll show the integration with Eclipse IDE, Subversion and JIRA. Learn how to set up a release-based project with a simple lifecycle, launch a build and deploy process, manage approvals and finally trace the results.

Watch the video

It's your DevOps solution for your process and your tools

Global Administration
 
Project Administration
 
Deploy environment parameters
 
Level Request details
Define your VCR and ITS in Global Admin
In Global Administration you define your versioning system and issue tracking system, and set up projects, users (and user groups), your build & deploy schedule and build & deploy Phases.

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Let us give you personal insight on how DevOps can make your development -and release process much faster and reliable.

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Multiple project streams for each project

For each project you can define multiple project streams (linked to a versioning trunk or branch). Each project stream can have a life cycle with Build, Test and Production levels.

These levels can be linked to DTAP environments. Each environment contains Phases to do the desired build and deploy actions.

rest
Parameter driven phases

The IKAN ALM phases are parameter-driven. You can define parameters hierarchical: at machine level, environment level and the actual build or deploy.

Here you see an overview of deploy parameters at the deploy environment level.

rest
Detailed overview

For every build and deploy step, a detailed overview is available.

Every Phase detail can be consulted, such as its parameters, messages, stack trace and log files.

rest

What our customers are saying

  • RMA client picture

    Antonio Motta - ICT infrastructure manager, RMA (Italy)

    "Our goal was to have one product, that managed the whole build and deploy process for all the platforms we used to deliver our IT services. We saved more than 2/3 on the software maintenance cost."

  • Constellation Brands client picture

    Jim McGrath - Data Warehouse Manager, Constellation Brands (USA)

    "My internal team was excited about the possibilities your software offers and is anxious to hear next steps. Additionally, you should know that I have ensured my team knows the level of effort and support your team has provided.

    It is hands down the best support I have seen from any vendor I’ve worked with."

  • Vivium client picture

    Willy Mutsaerts - Technology Architect and Software asset management, P&V (Belgium)

    "IKAN ALM allowed us to modernize our mainframe development as we wanted to use an eclipse based development environment and needed to have a compatible life cycle management solution to replace our current mainframe only version control software.

    And IKAN ALM allowed us to interface with the mainframe and has extensive customization possibilities."

    Watch Mr. Mutsaerts talk about IKAN ALM:

    Benefits of IKAN ALM Business Case What makes IKAN ALM unique
  • GMF client picture

    Jerome Rouil - IT Team Manager, GMF COVEA group (France)

    "We did a POC to verify if IKAN ALM could support our different ways of deploying (on different types of platforms), our current way of doing development and the build and deploy scripts we were currently using.

    IKAN ALM allows us to work from everywhere, and to reuse existing scripts. We could use our existing security system (LDAP), SMTP for messaging and notifications.

    We use IKAN ALM for all our JAVA applications and SAS reporting that are deployed to 30 different locations"

People are choosing DevOps because they want

Higher quality

As developers will version their code and as parallel development is supported you will have a more sound code base. Managing the many different releases and hot fixes becomes fast, transparent and reliable.

More frequent deploys

A complete and automated process (build, deploy, approval and notification) is triggered once a developer commits his code to the version control repository. This process is reliable, repeatable and auditable so you can you can deploy more frequently.

Lower development costs

More frequent and qualitative deploys means happy business people since they'll have their desired functionality available faster. The automated process eliminates human mistakes and allows people to do more interesting work. A true win/win.

These companies already use IKAN ALM

A list of our clients: Vivium, Reale Mutua, GMF and Constellation Brands