UrbanCode Deploy Reviews

There are several most valuable features for us.

1. Automation of deployment processes for all our projects;
2. It's user-friendly enough for our development team to access and use on a daily basis; and
3. The lead approval process is one of the unique features in it that can't be found in any other automation tool.

It's improved our organization's functions in a few ways.

1. It has automated the manual deployment process for all Java, .NET, and C++ applications;
2. It makes is easy to track production releases with date and time; and
3. It's gotten rid of the manual errors for deployment that occurred from manual testing.

I think that the IBM support team needs to be more proactive in their responses to PMR tickets raised by customers. Also, the plugins for ServiceNow Integration need to be updated.

I've used it for three years.

We've haven't encountered any issues with deployment.

We haven't experienced any issues of instability.

We've been able to scale sufficiently.

I'd rate customer service at a 5 out of 10.

I'd rate technical support at a 6 out of 10.

We previously used IBM Rational Build Forge and then migrated to UrbanCode Deploy, which has more flexibility and process-oriented features.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward with the installation of agents and clients. The configuration process and specific jobs are dependent on the complexity of your application or project.

Our client's in-house team helped with the implementation, and they had an expertise of about an 8 out of 10.

I can't say exactly what our ROI is, but as we're in the insurance sector, I know that this is a cost-efficient tool.

It's available at a very reasonable price.

We evaluated OpenStack and Amazon Web Services.

It's best to do a POC on the applications you're currently running to check the feasibility of using UrbanCode Deploy.

We like a few things, such as the calendar, the permissions model, and the process editing. The component template and deployment interface are very good.

Our organization has already improved by quite a bit by taking out so much manual intervention from multiple people doing the deployments. We've simplified our process and the deployments are now much faster.

Sometimes the deployment process reports are faulty. I've run into situations where the job says it was successful but it really erred-out. It would be nice if the reports are correct all the time.

The configurations tab takes forever to load. It doesn't work very well so that needs to be improved. Also, you can't filter by resource tag, which would be useful.

We've used it for six months.

The deployment reports are faulty.

So far, the product has been very stable.

We're in the process of moving pretty much most of our codes to run through it one way or another. I anticipate it will scale well.

So far, we haven't had an issues with support so it seems okay.

Our existing solution was mostly manual deployments so that, of course, is very error-prone. We looked at several different solutions to try to see what we could implement quickly and what would have the most impact, the most return on investment in a relatively quick amount of time. This was the tool we decided to try out and so far it's working pretty good.

It's very time consuming, the setup of the solution. We ended up scripting a lot of it, so that it was quicker. There's a lot of pieces that you have to set up for one particular job to run on it. You can actually make steps and end up having to sit there and figure out what you missed, so we ended up scripting a lot of it so that we wouldn't miss pieces, which made it also quicker to set up new applications, to be able to get all the way through deployment.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

It's a pretty straightforward tool for straightforward deployments. If they have many complicated deployments, they're going to really want to look at the plugins and what's out of the box to make sure that it's going to be able to do what they need to do, and that they need to make sure that they have the resources and time to spend setting it up.

There are three main valuable features for us:

1. The ability to deploy objects consistently to any of our multiple environments;
2. Prior deployments and logging stored in a web GUI which can be accessed by any member of the team; and
3. Flexibility of the plugin system to use features supplied by IBM or the ability to write our own.

Teams are now able to schedule deployments to any environment and watch in a screen the deployment occur. This has allowed teams to reduce the number of staff online when a deployment occurs.

Tracking and audit-ability of the deployments are easy and allow teams to research any issues quickly and resolve the issue with little assistance.

The reporting functionality is limited and it is difficult to retrieve information from the database due to the table structure.

We've used it for about one year.

We encountered no issues with deployment.

We have occasional minor issues with stability.

We've had no issues scaling it.

6/10

7/10

The prior solution was created by our company. We determined that to add the features required to expand our solution, it was better to use a vendor product.

The initial setup was straightforward and well-documented.

We implemented it through our in-house team.

I'm not able to answer this.

Cost is based on the number of agents installed. This is normally one agent per target box/system.

Yes, we evaluated Jenkins.

This product is excellent for deploying components and running processes related to deployments. It is not intended to be a build system, but is easy enough to incorporate into any CI Build system. The tool has two "sister" products which work well with UrbanCode Deploy. It is intended for this tool to be used for larger companies.

Repeatable, reliable deployments from one environment to the next.

We are able to help customers automate deployments reliably. 

I've used it for eight months.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

The IBM Urbancode team is a great bunch of people and they are extremely knowledgeable.

Plugin-based architecture.

It has provided a platform for traceability across the whole release cycle for more than 700 diverse applications.

• Licensing structure - pay per machine deployed to.
• Additional integrations with ALM solutions.
• Unclear why it doesn't support build automation, which is covered by a separate product.

3 months.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No - scalability is handled via client relays which offload the server's work to proxies.

Good.

Good so far. Not a lot of history there.

Yes, we used Build Forge. It's a build tool that was being re-purposed for deploy and it was beginning to fail often.

Very straightforward. Command line prompts to install all components, and hook into enterpriseDB. Trial version will use its own Derby DB.

TBD. Have handled most of this in-house so far, but we have a service contract available. No info on expertise.

No specific numbers right now, but we're saving the deploy team, the infrastructure team, the help desk team, and the development teams many hours. Results are variable based on how much automation was already done, and the quality of the legacy code.

Evaluated Automic, CA product offerings. Also kept tabs on the Serena offering.

• Start with small wins to build momentum towards the larger applications.
• Align with the compliance team from the beginning. We had compliance and internal audit in the room for the PoC to run through concerns up front.

I've found that the most valuable feature is the Server/Agent architecture. In most cases, once you install the agent onto a machine, you rarely (if ever) need to log on to the agent machine itself to diagnose issues with most scripted deployment tasks.

Urbancode Deploy allowed us to implement a nearly-complete Continuous Delivery solution for one of our web applications - builds were deployed and promoted straight through from a development environment all the way to a Staging/UAT environment with little to no engineer interaction.

Upgrade & Migration from older versions, as well as Import & Export of application automation data between multiple environments has some room for improvement.

2.5 years.

Installation into a clean environment is easy and straightforward. Upgrading an existing Urbancode Deploy server is unfortunately quite tricky, as many of the migration scripts for the database need patching and fixes based on the specific customer install.

Only on a couple of very rare occasions, and IBM Tech Support was very responsive in all of those.

Yes, with this particular product it is important to heed the provided best practices for inventory management and server specs - the larger the installation footprint, the more quickly the internal database size and repository size will grow if not managed appropriately.

Their sales and licensing support seems adequate. I would encourage any potential customer to make sure they accurately forecast their licensing needs as the PO process seems to take weeks rather than days.

IBM's Technical support is fantastic when you are in a "down" state - unfortunately I feel it drops off quite quickly from there. If the application is not entirely non-functional, their capacity for working through functional issues does not seem very deep.

Yes, I have used FinalBuilder for deployment automation - which did not use a Server/Agent model or offer any sort of repository management or inventory tracking, which were the major selling points for Urbancode Deploy.

Initial setup in a clean environment is very straightforward.

In-house.

Urbancode Deploy allowed our group to go from managing deployment of two enterprise applications to fifteen, over the course of 18 months, with no increase in staffing or increase in system downtime. The number of deployments performed by our group increased exponentially and our deployment success rate went up by quite a bit.

Yes, we evaluated Thoughtworks GO and Nolio alongside this product.

Be sure to budget for/ accommodate a demo/dev/test environment for uDeploy as well as a production environment.

• Automatic detection of new builds (via an agent on Nexus).
• The ability to easily create a custom deployment workflow in the web interface.

Deployment to various environments can be done from a web interface without needing to manually copy files around or log into systems to run scripts.

Full blown support for repositories such a SonaType Nexus would be better than having to deploy an agent to watch particular filesystem paths.

We've been using IBM UrbanCode for 3 months.

No issues with deployment and the automatic deployment of agents and agent relay has proved very useful.

We have not encountered any issues with stability.

Currently a single node is sufficient for our needs, so scalability has not been an issue.

There was no need to contact customer service.

There was no need to contact technical support.

The previous solution was a mix of manually copying files around and logging into systems to run scripts. IBM UrbanCode Deploy enabled us to easily take builds from SonaType Nexus and deploy them into the environments without needing manual steps.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very easy to install and configure IBM UrbanCode Deploy and remotely deploy its agents.

In-house.

Before chosing this product we also evaluated Midvision RapidDeploy, Thoughtworks Go and Xebia Labs XL Deploy.
Thoughtworks Go: the plugin to integrate with Sonatype Nexus is a thirdparty plugin and has been broken for sometime.
Xebia Labs XL Deploy: The set up of each app for deployment is overly complicated.