This is the world we live in. As software gets more complex everyday, businesses need a way to automate the deployment and support of not only today’s stacks, but tomorrow’s as well. The need for qualified experts at this level of stack configuration and deployment far exceeds the supply and is getting worse. That’s where Arganteal comes in.
Arganteal automates deployment and configuration of networks, infrastructure, and applications on currently available data management platforms ranging from OpenStack to Azure. Arganteal works with any application programming interface (“API”), any platform, and any program layer. Arganteal automation can replace the tedious projects that routinely occupy expensive subject matter experts. Without Arganteal, the demand for these engineers will continue to outstrip supply.
While platforms like Azure provide menus to build simple stacks, a lot of manual adjustment is required for any real world application deployment. This leads to significant time, money, and talent expenditures. To do the same thing on AWS or VMware requires a completely different set of processes and experts. Alternatively, Arganteal automates the deployment for complex applications on any of these platforms.
Arganteal has proven its service with three successful deployments, including one with Hewlett Packard in which 10 hours were budgeted for costly engineering to complete the job… Arganteal did it in 40 minutes.
Arganteal is revolutionizing the $20 billion software stack deployment and support market, and establishing a future-proof means of deployment — we’re literally automating the construction of the cloud! Read on to see how it works!
Currently, enterprises and their consultants spend countless hours of expert time manually deploying, configuring, re-deploying, upgrading, and patching application stacks.
Unlike software development which is increasingly done offshore, deployment and support is almost always done by engineers that are near the data centers where the software resides and proprietary applications are deployed, thus the hourly rates for this kind of work remains high.
A key way to meet this talent demand and drive down costs for enterprises is to provide engineers with automation tools that dramatically increase their productivity. Enter the exclusive domain of Arganteal in the software as a service (SaaS) space!
While other companies like Opscode Chef, Puppet, and Ansible are only focused on the infrastructure, but not the application, and only manage, archive, and retrieve scripts, Arganteal synthesizes scripts for both. Arganteal technology allows standard workflows to be compiled with detail and customization unique to the stack such that the entire process can be automated.
Arganteal holds two patents on automating the deployment script generation for the full application stack.
The Arganteal approach captures for reuse the scripts used by current subject matter experts for an application, infrastructure, or network layer. The resulting libraries then inform our patented compilers which produce customized deployment commands for each specific implementation. The result eliminates large blocks of tedious and error prone engineering work and time per deployment. Several real deployments have confirmed this (more on these in the next section).
Arganteal technology is especially powerful for the open source community where technology is always evolving and a plethora of interrelated best practices are needed to maintain, capture, and deploy new applications.
Ultimately, the Arganteal application comes down to saving time and money (in relatively large proportions), with the added benefits of minimizing errors, improving efficiency and reducing time required to upgrade and patch. Instead of manual deployment each time, libraries written and accumulated for the first deployment may be used for every patch, service pack, or upgrade on the environment, thereby saving large blocks of engineering hours and more than half of the projected cost.
Arganteal focused initially on the deployment and configuration of certain Microsoft applications with three successful commercial engagements thus far.
Case 1: Skype for Business (formerly Lync)
We partnered with The Via Group, a certified Microsoft partner, to validate Arganteal’s deployment solution. Skype for Business is an enterprise application that adds several desktop functions including instant messaging, desktop sharing, web conferencing, voice and video to Microsoft Office.
Case 2: Skype of Business Training Lab
Prior to Arganteal, deployment of this training lab would have taken a staggering 200 hours. Arganteal cut that down to 8 hours.
Case 3: Skype for Business at Hewlett-Packard
This normally 10-hour job was completed in a mere 40 minutes by Arganteal’s automatic script deployment.
Arganteal was founded by Steve Kelley, Russell Sellers, and Scott Stevens who have been working together for well over a decade. The partnership started at Steve’s first startup NetSolve, and continued to Cisco after the tech giant acquired NetSolve in 2004. The team also worked together at BreakingPoint and Shoregorup before founding Arganteal.
Steve Kelley, CEO
Steve began his career at Motorola as a Technical Fellow. He ended up at Cisco after his company NetSolve was acquired by Cisco for $140 million. After leaving Cisco, Steve worked in business development at BreakingPoint and Shoregroup.
Russell Sellers, CTO
Russell began his career at NASA working on mission software automation. He trained NASA engineers on compiler and artificial intelligence technologies to enable them to compile mission plans. In his role at Cisco, Russell gained firsthand experience with the virtualization deployment problems the industry is now facing. He has also served as an IT Expert at Waste Management, CCIE and engineer at NetSolve, and was a key technical expert in NetSolve’s acquisition by Cisco.
Scott Stevens, CFO / Sales
Scott began his career as a CPA at KPMG. While at Cisco and later BreakingPoint, he worked on channel and enterprise sales.