11 May, 2020
AWS Marketplace offers Cutover’s IT work orchestration platform for remote teams
Cloud

The SaaS-based platform can help remote workers get their work done more effectively during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cutover’s SaaS-based IT work orchestration and observability platform, offering deep-dive orchestration management tools for teams in enterprise IT, financial services, and more, is now available through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. Built to help companies successfully manage the hundreds to thousands of steps and changes in ongoing projects without leaving details behind, the platform can be used to detail and perform needed steps for regulatory compliance, cloud migrations, application development, and other projects where granular controls are critical.

The company’s IT work orchestration and observability platform goes well beyond typical project management tools that solely manage project workflows from start to finish, said Ky Nichol, CEO of Cutover. One of its main strengths of the platform during the current COVID-19 pandemic is that it empowers remote IT teams to get their work done, no matter where individual team members are located.

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“The platform helps better manage IT projects, generally through the latter stages of projects,” Nichol said. “It is brought in when the planning needs, the bits of a project, to go live so as not to risk the IT operations of a company. It’s detailing the nitty-gritty connections and then someone checking off a box” to ensure that the minute details have been properly completed.

“Typical project management doesn’t do this,” said Nichol. “It doesn’t get detailed enough. It only says when it will happen, not what has to be done step-by-step.”

With Cutover, IT teams actually orchestrate the needed steps in a project dynamically and bring it all alive in an operational theater, said Nichol. “This puts the nitty-gritty in the plans, where project management software is not designed to do that and can’t do that.”

By now being available in the AWS Marketplace, it will be easier for new customers to find and buy Cutover’s services. It will also simplify billing for users by putting the services onto a customer’s existing AWS invoice.

Many large customers, including major banks and other Fortune 500 organizations, use Cutover’s work orchestration and observability platform to regularly oversee some 300,000 changes and steps on projects, which helps them organize the painstaking work that needs to be done, said Nichol.

“It’s a very messy situation all the time” for those companies, he said.

Cutover includes an orchestration layer for getting steps accomplished and an observability layer watches how all the work lines up and when it will happen.

Companies that have critical regulatory and governance responsibilities, which go along with their needed IT projects, can pack those needed details into runbooks to ensure compliance, said Nichol.

“The exciting thing with AWS is you can take that from just being in a process, a checklist, and turn it into a digitization of that process,” Nichol said. The platform puts things in the proper context and provides the proper steps for governance wherever needed.

“It can configure an approved path to put an application into the cloud using AWS,” he said. “It will give them a quick and digital experience of getting the application up and running properly in the cloud.”

The platform acts like a quarterback working with his offensive and defensive players in the American game of football, he said. “The quarterback can’t talk to all the members of the team in the middle of a play, because it’s too dynamic. That’s what Cutover orchestrates–all those details.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues around the world, Cutover can help remote workers and their virtual teams in multiple locations continue to orchestrate their projects and tasks in real-time, wherever they are located. The cloud-based SaaS platform includes a customizable user interface that allows companies to make changes to their project portfolios as needed, while also providing continual project visibility and reporting to executives and others. “In these challenging times, we remain focused on helping our clients to remotely orchestrate some of their most critical work,” he said.

Nichol’s background is in the space industry and that helped him come up with the idea for starting the company and its platform in 2015.

“The high-paced orchestration industry just wasn’t there to help with this” at that point, he said. “It was holding people back from getting projects done.”

Cutover’s market competitors include Plutora and XebiaLabs.
 

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