Reduce risk and build cloud-native program resilience with collaborative automation

Many cloud migration projects grapple with costs, while cloud-native transformation projects struggle to capture value. Against this backdrop, innovative approaches to operationalize cloud-native operations’ complexity deserve more prominence to ensure operations leaders get a greater sense of certainty on their cloud transformation journeys.

For IT operations leaders, Cutover remains a vendor to watch. It delivers a highly differentiated value proposition around bridging the gaps between IT operations teams and automation. Specifically, it de-risks complex application rollouts and technology resilience programs using three main strategies:

• It reduces the time required to codify and execute IT operations processes through process orchestration.
• It offers pre-built and custom integration functions to ITSM platforms, communications, automation tools.
• It provides visibility for business stakeholders into the status of their rollouts with real-time dashboards and audit trails.

HFS caught up with Cutover’s executive management team to learn about the progress of its corporate development.

Enabling better collaboration helps handle cloud native’s complexity

As for many startups, articulating the product fit and fine-tuning the value proposition is a continuous and challenging journey, but one that’s required for a company to gain operations leaders’ mindshare in the market. Cutover’s natural habitat is simplifying the new complexity of cloud-native operations.

In our view, much of Cutover’s differentiation comes from helping organizations operationalize that complexity through increased automation and technology resilience. The company positions around collaborative automation. Employing Simon Sinek’s Gold Circle model, one way to assess Cutover’s corporate development is moving from describing the “what”—observability and workforce orchestration (see our take here)—to describing the “how”—collaborative automation. It is building a framework for collaboration between teams such as DevOps,  Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and automation. One of its executives described it as the platform sitting between the creativity of people and Ansible (the open-source community project sponsored by Red Hat).

Cutover addresses the “why” by declaring, “We take the risk and cost out of your IT operations by enabling better collaboration between teams and automation.” But it seems fair to assume that this will crystalize over time, not least by incorporating and demonstrating more feedback from customers. The list of marquee customers is impressive, and compelling storytelling about these organizations could easily mitigate the lack of fully crystallized product fit.

Runbooks that can make automation consumable

Cutover automation focuses on runbooks. Its executives noted that Ansible often gets out of control and is not consumable anymore. Cutover is focusing its development efforts on making that automation consumable again, despite its enormous complexity and interdependencies. The goal is to provide operations executives with a single pane of execution to support the following use cases:

• Cloud migration: Orchestrate teams and technology dependencies to create a single source of execution of cloud migrations. Organizations will spend less time in the migration definition phases and can integrate into cloud tools for full automation.
• Release management: Optimize application deployments, patches, and updates across the IT estate. Enterprises can realize the value of CI/CD quicker by keeping everyone involved and on track. Optimization can also create consistency in upgrade and patching processes.
• Technology resilience: Accelerate technical recoveries across complex critical architectures and teams. The platform can help eliminate manual processes and automate planning and execution for quicker recovery.

Cutover is investing in deep integration in collaboration with AWS

Cutover outlined its 2022 achievements beyond its progress with positioning and crystalizing use case depiction. In its go-to-market strategy, Cutover significantly accelerated its collaboration with AWS and now offers a “Guided Cloud Migration Enterprise Package” available through the AWS Marketplace. Contributing notably to this milestone are its efforts on deep integration with Splunk and ServiceNow for ITSM, Ansible for infrastructure as a code to enable scripting, and Teams for messaging, to highlight just a few of the integrations Exhibit 1 shows.

Exhibit 1: Cutover is double-clicking on integration to deliver collaborative automation

Source: HFS Research, Cutover 2022

Notable customer success stories include the second-largest US bank, where Cutover was deployed to build runbooks to enable the failover of 863 applications across 13 lines of business. Another example of the complexity of engagements is the Euro Stock Exchange & Financial Information Company, where Cutover was deployed to conduct a failover of data centers. Using Cutover reduced the amount of planning and preparation time by 80% compared to manual tools and processes.

For 2023, a key focus for Cutover is to make automation consumable across organizations. For developers, efforts are focused to deliver runbooks-as-code and continuing self-service integrations. Cutover’s goal is scenario-based automation, delivering runbooks that can adapt based on variables. Cutover helps organizations operationalize the complexity of cloud native, where traditional approaches easily reach their limits.

The Bottom Line: A more effective collaboration between IT Operations teams and automation can reduce the risks of cloud-native transformations.

Cutover has done the hard bit by expanding its roster of marquee clients and deepening its relationship with AWS. Having those clients tell the story about the value of collaborative automation is crucial for accelerating Cutover’s corporate development. For operations leaders, the value doesn’t lie in either runbooks or DevOps but in de-risking the new complexity of cloud-native operations.