Latest Gartner reports confirms Microsoft ALM Leadership

The latest Gartner report from February 2015 once more puts Microsoft in the leadership quadrant:

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The report itself shows interesting trends on the ALM market as a whole, but has some limitations on that vision almost as contradiction after having changed from “ALM” to “ADLM” a couple years ago, especially when it acknowledges in the summary that “The push to speed up the pace of delivery is increasing the focus on agile and DevOps practices in application development life cycle management.”

Then it mentions DevOps when talking about IBM, Atlassian and Rally, but not Microsoft or VersionOne. This is puzzling because Microsoft, and maybe IBM are the only that actually have a vision for the operations side of ALM. The report in itself

It says for IBM and Rally:

IBM has a large, comprehensive suite of ADLM products covering the full life cycle, and a strong position in supporting DevOps practices.

Rally has a strong understanding of agile, DevOps and SAFe principles.

Both IBM and Microsoft bought 3rd party release management tools almost at the same time, and Microsoft has gone even further in integrating its Release Management tools with its VSO offering. If you take into account its Azure DevOps capabilities, it is the de facto leader. However this seems to have gone unnoticed.

Or maybe the report is based on an earlier version: the same quote on SAFe from the previous report remains unchanged, even though Microsoft released SAFe-ready process templates for TFS last September. The current one reads:

Microsoft lacks the agile depth of pure-play vendors around the enterprise agile capabilities of project portfolio analysis, and support of SAFe.

At any rate, all these half-baked references on DevOps point to it trying to be trendy while at the same time directly contradicting its own statement from 2013:

The application development life cycle management (ADLM) tool market is focused on the planning and governance activities of the software development life cycle (SDLC). ADLM products are focused on the "development" portion of an application's life, with the term ADLM evolving from the term application life cycle management (ALM).

And this is because more and more DevOps also includes managing the lifecycle of released applications, such as with HockeyApp. Can you separate the operations piece of ALM from DevOps and claim it is pure development? I figure Gartner might be renaming this report, again, pretty soon.

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