The DevOps evolution brought the developer and operations communities together, but now, companies are putting an emphasis on getting the business owners and stakeholders more involved in the entire application development process.
BMC wants to bridge the gap between developers, operations and business owners, which is why it launched its new Innovation Suite today. The Innovation Suite is essentially an extension of its digital service-management solutions, and it’s designed to support all of the different personas inside an organization, including support for no-code, low-code and pro-coder development environments.
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Developers are key players for today’s digital organizations, but it is the business owners who understand what the business outcome of the application they are building should be, said Jason Frye, vice president of digital innovation at BMC. BMC’s Innovation Suite provides one single platform for this kind of collaboration, and the actual execution of an application can happen all in one place.
One of the components worth highlighting, according to Frye, is the Innovation Studio, which allows someone to build an application and add the business logic to it simply by using drag-and-drop.
Amateur developers may use the same no-code capabilities in Innovation Studio, said Frye, but they might want to have the option to write or interface with external systems, like embedding a Google Maps API or a natural language processing API. With Innovation Suite, developers can connect to and add that code directly to that environment, and that code snippet becomes another drag-and drop-element that they can use to design their applications, he said.
“There is a lot of power and stepping stones inside [Innovation Studio],” said Frye.
Professional developers on the other hand will have access to the BMC platform, the company’s digital service-management platform, both as code and as a platform where they can extend and add their own components.
“We provide the studio, the SDK to extend it, and a set of connectors and components that can be used to build and connect to other systems in the environment,” said Frye. “The unique [part] is that it allows you to extend your capabilities that you already have from a company like BMC around IT operations-management excellence, digital service management for things like help desk, and embed those capabilities into the applications you are building.”
BMC has also created a marketplace where developers can publish their components into an ecosystem of customers, business partners, and individual developers who are building content on the platform itself.
According to Frye, the Innovation Suite is available during a time when developers’ relationship with business has changed. Applications are becoming critical to drive innovation, but with rapid release cycles and an increasing amount of projects, developer can become fatigued, he said. With Innovation Suite, developers can pass up some of the longer business processes or tasks to the business leaders, so they can co-create digital service-management applications themselves, without overloading developers, said Frye.
BMC Innovation Suite is initially available on Amazon Web services, and it comes with features like a library of connectors and components, REST APIs, and a set of tools and samples that is integrated with the Innovation Studio feature.