I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but the pace of the world seems to continue accelerating. Organizations—and the developers and IT teams that work in them—need to be able to adapt and respond quickly to changing demands. DevOps addresses this challenge for app development and IT infrastructure. However, a new application lifecycle equivalent is emerging, called AppOps, which seeks to bring the same sort of efficiency and agility of DevOps to existing IT services.
Just as DevOps creates an automated life cycle between software development and IT operations, AppOps streamlines application analysis, deployment and management. Sparked by the emergence of BYOD and the consumerization of IT, AppOps simplifies how IT securely delivers and manages existing enterprise and browser-based apps, while quickly adapting to demands of line-of-business managers.
“For a long time now, businesses have shifted toward ‘commercial off-the-shelf’ software packages in hopes of saving resources,” says Calvin Hsu, vice president of Product Marketing for Windows App Delivery at Citrix. “However, this shift toward packaged software doesn’t change the operational needs for IT. They need a fast, simple way to securely roll out and deliver new applications in alignment with operations—an AppOps approach.”
According to Hsu, AppOps provides a variety of potential benefits, including:
- IT can more quickly respond to demands from line-of-business managers.
- cloud-based management infrastructure can play a more significant role in accelerating IT deployments.
- A virtualized secure browser can make browser-based and SaaS apps more secure, and even lock down browser vulnerabilities on apps purchased outside of the IT process.
- Improve communications between IT organizations and executive teams to improve planning and alignment between business and IT objectives.
- Improve service quality by automating the application analysis/deployment process to initiate a constant feedback loop (metrics, user experience, stability, etc.), that keeps everyone related to the app life cycle up to date and enables truly proactive management.
Hsu says that app and desktop delivery simplification and collaboration between vendors is simplifying how IT deploys and delivers apps to employees—virtually, centrally, securely and reliably. He adds that cloud-based management infrastructure makes it easier for IT to offer a menu of services to help business managers determine which apps and data resources will work best for their teams.
On the one hand, AppOps seems like a natural evolution of the DevOps culture. On the other hand, it also seems like it’s just an extension of DevOps rather than its own separate thing. It is simply taking the DevOps culture—breaking down silos and removing roadblocks to streamline collaboration—and applying it to existing IT services.
What do you think? Is AppOps the “next big thing” or just a new buzzword being applied to the same old DevOps?