On Monday, IBM announced the acquisition of UrbanCode, a provider of software delivery automation solutions. UrbanCode’s continuous release and deployment tools will be integrated into the IBM Rational portfolio to bolster their DevOps capabilities.              

“…software is eating the world.” – Marc Andreessen

Software has emerged as the primary agent for differentiation for a growing number of companies. It is defining a greater portion of end-value for organization’s solutions, but also consuming an ever-larger share of their development costs. Many of these companies have re-evaluated their processes and adopted Agile methodologies to help speed software development. Our findings suggest this has helped. In VDC’s 2012 software and system developer survey, engineers using Agile were more likely to be ahead of schedule on their current project, despite code bases three times as large as those not using iterative methods.

“Companies that master effective software development and delivery in rapidly changing environments such as cloud, mobile and social will have a significant competitive advantage,” - Kristof Kloeckner, general manager, IBM Rational Software.

Unfortunately, Agile methodologies only address the software development. Just increasing the pace of software design can place considerable strain on an organization and result in bottlenecks elsewhere in the development lifecycle. To move in the right direction, development and operations need to operate at the same velocity. This is where the incorporating the UrbanCode Application Release Automation should provide synergy. By automating much of the testing and deployment processes, organizations can speed up the operations side of their business to match the pace of the Agile software development.

Integration of the UrbanCode offerings into IBM Rational’s portfolio represents a valuable extension of their DevOps implementation support. We expect much of the initial market traction to come from enterprise applications. However, with the volume of embedded software code continuing to grow while project timelines shrink, this approach will increasingly resonate in several embedded industries.