Why pay for a middleware expert if he or she is going to spend all of their time doing deployments? XebiaLabs is hoping Deployit 1.3 will help solve this problem. The updated software was released two months ago in Europe, and the company behind it is now offering this Java application deployment automation system in the United States.

XebiaLabs has been working on Deployit for two years now, and Andrew Phillips, vice president of product development at XebiaLabs, said that the entire effort was based on the observation that deploying software in enterprises is often similar to building software in enterprises 10 years ago.

“One of the main complaints we see is that enterprises have expensive and highly skilled middleware specialists for WebShere and WebLogic, and these experts are spending a large portion of their day-to-day time clicking through consoles to get things deployed,” he said.

“That’s a waste of their time. As a developer, you’re shut out of the deployment process. There’s a strong bottleneck of getting things out to your QA environments quickly.”

That’s because development teams have focused on automating the build process, not the deployment process, said Phillips. He added that automating the build process is only half the agile battle. Once software is built, most organizations, he said, have a bottleneck between that process and deployment.

“Most companies have gone a long way to automate their build processes,” Phillips said. “They’re delivering production-ready software every iteration. That’s all well and good, but 99% of the people we ask, ‘What do you do with the software you build every night?’ answer with, ‘It goes into a repository.’ ”

Deployit solves this problem by giving lower-skilled workers the ability to push out new builds to deployment environments in test labs and on production servers. Deployit integrates with existing build, repository and change management systems to ensure it works with enterprise environments. Once it has been integrated, Deployit learns about the environments it will be used for, then automatically determines what to do with a deployable artifact. It does this without any agents required on the target servers.

Phillips said that Deployit 1.3 is available today with a typical license for five users costing around US$40,000. He said that version 2.0 of Deployit will be available by the end of the year.