Microsoft has acquired InCycle’s release management solution InRelease, a tool for automatically deploying application components to target services in different environments. InCycle is a Canadian company that specializes in application lifecycle management (ALM) and release management solutions on Microsoft’s .NET platform.
As Microsoft is only acquiring the InRelease business unit, the rest of the company will continue to operate independently and focus on ALM consulting. InCycle was founded in 2002 and, last year, the company merged with Sirk Technologies, another ALM-focused Microsoft partner with offices in San Francisco and Seattle.
InRelease enables agile .NET teams to automate the release cycles of their apps. It automates deployments directly from Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server, Microsoft’s own ALM and DevOps solution, to all environments, including production. This ensures all deployments are done the same way. It also automates the approval workflow and auditing support.
“DevOps is an increasingly important part of ALM and a growing area of interest to chief information officers as businesses are pressured to develop and deploy quality applications at an increasingly faster pace,” said S. Somasegar, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for its developer division, in a statement today. “The InRelease continuous delivery solution will automate the development-to-production release process from Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, helping enable faster and simpler delivery of applications.”
InRelease was already integrated directly with Team Foundation Server, and InCycle hopes that this acquisition will help it to add release management capabilities to Team Foundation Server. Microsoft did not specify how exactly it plans to do so beyond noting that “this acquisition will extend Microsoft’s offerings in the ALM and DevOps space” and that it plans to integrate it “from TFS through to production, all in one solution, and all integrated with TFS.”