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Gartner Names 5 Cool Vendors in Application Development and Platforms

Gartner Names 5 Cool Vendors in Application Development and Platforms

Gartner Names 5 Cool Vendors in Application Development and Platforms

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. has released its newest vendor report highlighting five emerging solution providers that offer innovative alternatives in the application development space. Cool Vendors in Application Development and Platforms focuses on startups that offer some disruptive capability or opportunity. Gartner says that cool vendors “exist across all major areas of technology and innovation” and application leaders that pay close attention to these trends can avoid the “disadvantage in trying to keep up.”

At solutions Review, we’ve read the full report, available here, and want to take the opportunity to expand upon the introduction has given to these providers. Though Gartner’s process for selecting Cool Vendors is somewhat mysterious, we believe our unique view of the marketplace can help you better understand how these tools will fit into the overarching landscape as they mature.

This year’s report emphasizes the importance of “moonshot thinking.” Application leaders should be evaluating new application development and platform vendors that work towards modernization and easing the burdens of digital product delivery. This article summarizes each vendor’s specializations, and highlights what types of organizations would benefit from each solution.

ChaosIQ

ChaosIQ is a commercial product built with the free and open source Chaos Toolkit and Platform. What truly makes this vendor special is that it makes the concept of chaos engineering much more consumable for the average person. It improves communication, collaboration, management, automation, and more. As part of their efforts to improve communication, which is crucial to chaos engineering, ChaosIQ offers a SaaS and on-premise web UI. There is also an API available for teams using SRE, or DevOps that want that kind of technology. ChaosIQ also allows its experiments to be shared across different teams and even companies. This allows chaos engineering newbies to build confidence by basing their own experiment on existing experiments that were conducted by experienced teams and organizations.

Bottom Line: ChaosIQ’s most unique feature is its Control Plane API, a useful tool for DevOps teams that need to execute environment provisioning, chaos, and test automation from their pipeline tools. ChaosIQ also offers a web interface that allows users to automate certain aspects of the chaos through control dashboards.

Proto.io

Proto.io is used to create fully interactive prototypes for mobile applications, as well as Apple watch and VR prototypes. A simple drag-and-drop interface allows nondesigners and nondevelopers to quickly mock up their ideas. Proto.io simulates all native mobile functionalities, including interactive touch gestures, screen transitions, high-end animations, and more. Users can transfer and experience these prototypes on actual mobile devices, rather than simply watching a computer monitor.

Bottom Line: Application leaders that want modern mobile app UX capabilities, such as smartwatch and VR applications, should definitely experiment with Proto.io. This platform is well suited for UX professionals, software developers, and team members with less technical/design experience. Proto.io is a powerful application capable of rapidly developing realistic, professional-looking application prototypes.

SeaLights

SeaLights provides a collection of tools designed to make testing more efficient through the use of analytics. SeaLights brings ML and AI technologies to augment software developers in their work, thereby supporting time to market without compromising application quality. “Test more” mentality slows pace of delivery and doesn’t provide clarity on exactly which parts of the application need further testing. SeaLights provides three different analytics: test quality, test impact, and release quality. These are combined with a build scanner and test listener to give comprehensive coverage across multiple layers of tests (unit, API, UI) and formats (manual, automated).

Bottom Line: Application leaders who are struggling with growing cycle times due to expanded test automation should definitely consider SeaLights. Specifically, teams that work with cloud-native applications that make use of mesh app and service architecture, in order to ensure that code changes are fully tested.

source{d}

source{d} combines traditional software development practices with ML and natural language processing to build complex software with improved user experiences. source{d} has two products using ML to analyze source code: source{d} Engine and source{d} Lookout. These tools allow enterprises to analyze large source-code repositories, and the results provide insight for various use cases such as code deduplication, security vulnerabilities, code retrieval and identification.

Bottom Line: source{d} provides application leaders with significant early market advantage through their focus on leading-edge, next-generation systems of innovation. Furthermore, their focus on ML and analytics is a positive sign. According to Gartner, AI-augmented software development and “ML on code” are set to become mainstream over the next five years.

Stoplight

Stoplight focuses on developer satisfaction and collaboration by enabling both API teams and API ecosystems, so suggestions and feedback are quickly obtained at the start of the API design phase. Stoplight also supports the simulation of API responses so that potential customers can start building their software even before the full API functionality has been implemented. Stoplight is also focused on automation through API testing that can be incorporated into a CI/CD pipeline. Documentation creation and editing is also supported, and includes the ability to create a simple API developer portal that can be hosted by the company. Customers can also export an API definitions package for separate publication through their own API developer portal.

Bottom Line: According to Gartner, the API product manager is key in delivering effective API’s. Stoplight improves the measurement and quality of the API’s that these managers handle. Moreso, the collaborative nature of Stoplight’s tools encourages stakeholders to work together.

You can download the full 2019 Gartner Cool Vendors in Application Development and Platforms report here. To learn more about other cool vendors, be sure to check out our 2019 Buyer’s Guide. In it, we compile data on the top vendors in the application development field and provide our Bottom Line for each.

Anna Birna Turner

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