September 12, 2023 - Sage Goodwin, Content Marketing Executive at Rimo3
Today we’re announcing our Danube release, which includes a whole new Onboarding experience for customers, amongst a number of other improvements, that have all come from customer and partner feedback.
I sat down with our Chief Technology Officer, Samit Halvadia, to break down this release – our largest for the year, to get his perspective on what Danube provides today, and how it sets the stage for our next series of releases. To listen to the complete podcast, click here.
Q: The team has been working on some of the infrastructure for this release for several quarters. What was your focus for Danube and the specific feature set?
Samit: We went GA with Rimo3 Cloud around Thanksgiving of 2022, so we're almost a year into our product release of that platform. One of the biggest pieces of feedback we've gotten is that our customers love automation and love the fact that we’re eliminating the challenges they have with tedious, manual tasks.
But what would make it better? If we can erase even more technical debt, if we can automate more of the mundane, and if we can provide more insight for our customers when they’re going through the migration from legacy to modern, and that's really one of the big focuses of Danube, which is what can we do to ensure that we're removing as many technical debt based hurdles as possible so that folks can really understand where they are today what the level of effort it’s going to be to get to where they want to go.
Q: That’s pretty exciting, and a super big vision. How much of the release work was infrastructure versus features?
Samit: This is an incredibly feature-rich release that straddles customer and partner feedback with a lot of innovation. Danube will allow us to continue building on a great platform that lays the foundation of our larger vision around changing the Windows experience (both migration and management) for enterprise IT and their users. Danube is really the first step in helping us tie that vision together. There's a lot of really fun things that are getting in this launch or setting up the foundation with this release. We've been talking about a lot of the different pieces with the new pipeline process where now you can do individual processes rather than having to go through the entire pipeline.
The entire pipeline is still there. But now if you want to just test, or if you just want a package, or if you just want to see this one thing, you can now do that, which I think is really exciting. That’s a major change that can result in up to 90% faster completion time than our current product.
Q: I’ve heard a lot of our Preview Customers talk about all the work with the API. How do you see that as one of the big pillars of the release?
Samit: With our core product, customers can understand. Okay, this is what those applications are meant to do. This is how they're meant to behave, and this is how we want them to behave. And ultimately for us, once we understand that baseline of what’s important, do the discovery and complete the initial intelligent smoke test, then, once we've onboarded these applications, we can help customers decide, well, I have these 17 different ways I want to deploy the apps. Some will be AVD, some will be Windows 365, some just Windows 11. Some want to move to MSIX, some want to move to Intune, regardless of what that migration looks like. The enhanced API enables almost infinite choice for application lifecycle management across all of our customer’s infrastructure options - to integrate workflows with their existing tools and infrastructure.
Q: I know we just released a case study with one of our large, European customers, Outokumpu. There are some amazing stats in their interview.
Samit: They’re definitely a great example of leveraging automation. In just one part of their project, they estimated that they reduced a 4-month process down to just 8 or 9-days. Now imagine as they move Danube into production for their ongoing maintenance and management – 1,500 applications, with an enormous amount of regular updates and Windows patches, all being tested automatically, to ensure secure, functional workspaces, without pushing changes into production that break apps and slow end-user productivity. They’re also an example of a larger, more established IT shop, with critical tools to connect to Rimo3 Cloud through our API. I believe every large enterprise falls into this same category, and that’s why it was critical for us to add this functionality.
From our perspective, it's been really great seeing people start that digital transformation journey, but we've also started getting customers that have leveraged us on their journey to modern and are now using us in an ongoing management capacity, not just a transformation planning perspective, but also legacy IT operations around patch management, change, control, release, impact analysis.
Q: That’s great, there’s a ton more packed into our podcast, so I’ll leave the link below so people can get the full download.
Samit: Thanks Sage. We’ve got lots of great content coming out for this release, as well as interviews with integration partners and reviews from community members. It’s always great spending time with you to get the word out.
For More Information on the Rimo3 Cloud Danube Release:
Launch podcast and full interview with CTO, Samit Halvadia. Listen on YouTube.
Outokumpu Case Study summary: Modernizing Outokumpu VDI Infrastructure.
Outokumpu Full 10-page Case Study: Outokumpu Modernizes Its Application Environment With the Help of Rimo3
Danube: Release Notes
Breaking apart the Onboarding Pipeline
The current process for importing applications to the Rimo3 platform automatically progresses applications through each step of the onboarding process and into testing. This fully automated set and forget approach can be very useful but depending on what you are importing and from where you may ending up testing applications that you don’t need to, by breaking the onboarding pipeline we are giving you more control over the process of onboarding application without losing the ability to still automatically progress packages through some or all stages of the onboarding and testing process. At each stage of the onboarding process you have the ability to review and analyse the results and take necessary actions before progressing all suitable application to the next stage of the process, and ultimately into testing. (how much time will we save)
- 90% faster than current process
- More granular onboarding and testing
- Enhanced reporting for key stakeholders
Comprehensive Public API
The Rimo3 Public API has been updated to include additional endpoints that cover more of testing and administration activities that are available in the UI, allowing the onboarding, testing and modernization of application to be integrated into CI/CD pipelines or automated via the ITSM platform of your choice. (ServiceNow, Ivanti, BMC) Additionally, new endpoints enable the management of test environments, via the API, to create and configure Task Runners.
- Comprehensive functionality coverage
- Flexible integration for CICD pipelines
- Supports industry leading solutions
Packages & Programs (In Preview/Future release)
Support for SCCM Packages & Programs builds on Rimo3 legacy to modern journey by enabling applications that are still managed and deployed using SCCM’s Packages and Programs model to be imported, tested, converted, and ultimately exported to Intune or other modern management planes. The Rimo3 Import process automatically analyses the Programs in each Package to determine the correct Install and Uninstall Program so that a record can be created in the Rimo3 Platform. The new feature also includes functionality to make it easier to amend the Programs for imported packages if necessary as well as easily create additional records for packages with multiple valid install and uninstall Programs.
- Greater automated migration for legacy environments