Originally sourced from searchitoperations.techtarget.com. Article reflects the IT operations landscape as of mid-2017.
Keeping up with IT operations is a challenge when every week brings new changes to the vendor landscape. The first half of 2017 was marked by a wave of acquisitions, strategic partnerships, and product expansions that reshaped container orchestration, IT service management (ITSM), and application performance management (APM). Here is a structured breakdown of the top IT news stories that operations teams needed to understand heading into the second half of 2017.
AppDynamics Gets a New Owner — and a Product Update
Early in 2017, Cisco acquired AppDynamics, a widely respected application performance management platform with a strong enterprise customer base. The move was part of Cisco’s broader push into public cloud and cloud-native monitoring — an area where the networking giant had previously struggled. Prior acquisitions such as Piston Cloud, Metacloud, and CliQr had not fully delivered on Cisco’s cloud ambitions, and its own Intercloud initiative failed to gain meaningful traction.
For existing AppDynamics customers, the acquisition raised immediate concerns about product continuity and roadmap stability — a common reaction when a focused APM vendor is absorbed by a large infrastructure conglomerate. Those concerns were partially addressed when AppDynamics released its Developer Toolkit and Enterprise iQ updates in the months following the acquisition, signaling that product development continued at pace despite the ownership change.
Key takeaway for ops teams: When evaluating APM vendors, account for acquisition risk in your long-term toolchain planning. Post-acquisition product roadmaps can be unpredictable, even when initial updates look promising.
ServiceNow Bets on AI and Machine Learning for ITSM
ServiceNow made two significant moves in early 2017 that signaled a clear strategic direction toward AI-augmented IT service management. First, it acquired DxContinuum in January, a machine learning startup focused on applying predictive analytics to ITSM workflows. Weeks later, ServiceNow announced a long-term partnership with IBM to integrate IBM’s AI and machine learning technologies directly into ServiceNow’s IT services automation platform.
Together, these moves aimed to bring the following capabilities into ServiceNow’s platform:
- Anomaly detection: Automatically identify unusual patterns in IT operations data before they escalate into incidents.
- Auto-classification: Route and categorize service tickets without manual intervention.
- Predictive analytics: Anticipate infrastructure issues based on historical and real-time data.
- Performance benchmarking: Planned integration of benchmarking components to improve ongoing performance monitoring.
The broader implication was that AI and machine learning were no longer just aspirational additions to ITSM — they were becoming table-stakes capabilities. ServiceNow’s aggressive moves also suggested that the platform’s scope could expand well beyond traditional IT service management into broader operational intelligence use cases.
Kubernetes Attracts Major Enterprise Investment
Spring 2017 saw a cluster of acquisitions and integrations centered on Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration platform that was rapidly becoming the de facto standard for managing containerized workloads.
Pivotal and Cloud Foundry Add Kubernetes Support
Dell-owned PaaS provider Pivotal released a Cloud Foundry update with integrated Kubernetes support. Previously, operators could run Kubernetes alongside Cloud Foundry, but without formal support from either vendor, teams were largely on their own when troubleshooting integration issues. The formalized Kubernetes support brought developers and operations admins closer together under a unified toolset and improved application portability across environments.
Microsoft Acquires Deis to Close the Windows Gap
In April 2017, Microsoft acquired Deis, a Kubernetes-focused development company, to accelerate Kubernetes compatibility with the Windows operating system and deepen integration with Azure. At the time, Kubernetes had been built primarily for Linux environments, and running it on Windows required significant manual effort to translate Linux-targeted code. The alpha release of Windows support for Kubernetes was available by late 2017 but remained a work in progress, requiring additional time before it was suitable for production workloads.
Key takeaway for ops teams: If your organization runs Windows-heavy infrastructure, Kubernetes adoption in 2017 still required careful evaluation. Windows support was maturing but not yet production-ready at this point.
DevOps Deployment Tools Expand to Serve Broader Teams
A core challenge in DevOps tooling is that not everyone in the pipeline is a command-line expert. Early 2017 brought several UI and usability improvements to popular DevOps tools aimed at making CI/CD and configuration management accessible to a wider range of team members — including business stakeholders and operations engineers who prefer dashboards over terminal windows.
Notable UI and Usability Updates
- Jenkins Blue Ocean: A redesigned user interface for Jenkins that made CI/CD pipeline visualization more intuitive and granular, helping teams quickly identify where builds were failing.
- Ansible Tower dashboard refresh: Red Hat’s Ansible Tower — the proprietary management console for the Ansible configuration management tool — received a new UI dashboard that gave DevOps teams a single pane of glass for managing the entire automation pipeline.
- New Relic APM customizable dashboards: New Relic expanded its APM tool’s dashboard customization options, giving ops teams improved visibility into application performance across the infrastructure stack.
New Entrants Challenge Jenkins’ Dominance
While existing tools improved, newer CI/CD platforms began gaining attention as lower-friction alternatives. Shippable, from Shippable Inc., and Spinnaker — originally developed jointly by Google and Netflix — both made news in 2017 as options that required less hands-on configuration than Jenkins. For teams looking to reduce CI/CD maintenance overhead, these platforms represented a meaningful alternative worth evaluating.
Red Hat and AWS Team Up for Hybrid Cloud Container Portability
One of the fundamental value propositions of containers over traditional virtual machines is improved application portability. However, achieving true portability across hybrid cloud environments — combining on-premises infrastructure with public cloud — remained a practical challenge in 2017.
To address this, Red Hat and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a collaboration to update OpenShift, Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform, for improved container portability in hybrid environments. The partnership had a dual benefit: it brought AWS capabilities into on-premises Red Hat data centers, and it positioned AWS as a more competitive hybrid cloud alternative to Microsoft Azure for enterprises already invested in the Red Hat ecosystem.
Key takeaway for ops teams: The Red Hat–AWS collaboration highlighted a broader trend — public cloud providers were increasingly competing not just in the cloud, but for on-premises footprint through partnerships and hybrid cloud offerings. Organizations evaluating hybrid cloud providers in 2017 had meaningful new options to consider.
What These Trends Meant for IT Operations
Looking across these stories, several consistent themes emerge that remained relevant well beyond 2017:
- Consolidation creates both risk and opportunity. Acquisitions like Cisco–AppDynamics and Microsoft–Deis can accelerate product development or stall it. Ops teams should monitor acquisition trajectories when selecting vendors for long-term toolchain investments.
- AI is moving from experimental to operational in ITSM. ServiceNow’s aggressive AI investment reflected a broader industry shift toward automation of routine ITSM tasks such as ticket classification and anomaly detection.
- Kubernetes is becoming unavoidable. The volume of enterprise investment flowing into Kubernetes compatibility and tooling in 2017 foreshadowed the platform’s eventual dominance in container orchestration.
- Usability is a competitive differentiator. As DevOps practices spread beyond pure engineering teams, tools that offer strong UX and dashboard-driven workflows gain adoption advantages over CLI-first alternatives.
- Hybrid cloud is a first-class deployment model. Partnerships like Red Hat–AWS reflected growing enterprise demand for workload portability across on-premises and cloud environments.