Three Keys for Integrating Partnerships in a DevOps Platform
April 13, 2021

Leonid Belkind
StackPulse

A platform is something that provides its users a value that is greater than just the functionality it delivers. Trying to create a software platform in a silo won't cut it as software development practices have matured through continuous improvement, testing, and delivery.

For developers, building a platform means creating one link in a larger pipeline. Continuous delivery, monitoring tools, and elegant user interfaces are useless if they can't integrate with infrastructure, cloud services, or other developer tools.

Working in concert with industry partners is a critical step in the software development lifecycle. Collaboration with partners is just as important as analysis and design, but often gets short shrift. Without industry partnerships, both at the technical and business level, the platform will never achieve the necessary velocity and adoption.

To help organizations meet their goals, I'd like to highlight three strategies that software teams should consider to strengthen partnerships in the development cycle.

1. Remember: You're Part of a Toolchain

When you're building for software developers, reliability engineers (aka SREs), or anyone in the application lifecycle, you're actually part of a toolchain. In other words, you're a member of a broad ecosystem. You have a responsibility to your end users beyond the product, and this responsibility has two major components:

■ Ensuring the product blends in with your users' existing processes, workflows, and tools.

■ Teaming with other vendors to extend value and avoid outages and disruption.

2. Focus on the API

Fitting in seamlessly with an ecosystem starts with ensuring that your product is built to integrate. You can deliver services faster and increase value with attention to how you consume assets and reuse artifacts. That's where an API strategy comes in.

First, build the API and focus on how to make integration easy. After all, you want teams to reuse, repurpose, and consume existing assets instead of building services from scratch. This strategy leaves you with more time to focus on the value you can deliver to the toolchain.

Second, since you invested in tools and infrastructure to kickstart operations, you must be able to extract value from the product integrations. APIs can help. For instance, you can scale by building monitoring and automated reporting tools based on APIs. Reusing APIs can also free up scarce resources and allow more consistency and innovation. Plan to integrate APIs both internally within your organization and externally with partners.

3. Plan Holistically for Tech Integration and Go-To-Market

Your partnership strategy should be comprehensive, encompassing the technical integration and go-to-market campaign. Building on the APIs, you can start with product integration, but it's not enough. Without an equal investment in business development, you'll lose in the long run.

The goal is to ensure the platform is always integrated to deliver value faster, and that teams can test and deploy code in minutes not days. The benefit is scale. Even the largest enterprise software organizations have resource constraints and alliance priorities. Partners help every business extend their capabilities, providing expertise, relationships, engineering know-how, and sales or marketing reach you might not have today. They bridge gaps across security, issue detection, reporting, compliance, and cost management to deliver on the promise of continuous testing and reliability for end users.

Too often, building an application in isolation means individual organizations determine the type of testing that is done without taking partners into consideration. Collaboration needs to be end-to-end. Integration partners must communicate roadmap changes so they can plan feature rollouts and set expectations for testing future releases. This process is critical because, by design, integration testing will help shake out errors and evaluate the behavior and performance of the platform. More importantly, integrated testing provides confidence to partners on delivery, and in turn, provides consistency and cohesion in the communication of updates to end users.

After all, technical partnerships and product integration are wasted if the partnership stops at testing. Part of our responsibility to our customers is to work with our partners — with the companies that make the other tools customers use — to deliver education and awareness. If a customer isn't taking full advantage of the integrations you've built, then the value you've invested in building is for naught. Business development and marketing alliance managers need to conceive joint go-to-market campaigns that explain the joint value proposition. Look for intersection points in the business challenges and how customers can expeditiously overcome issues with advanced automation in every part of the software lifecycle.

Getting Started with DevOps Partnerships

Automation as well as collaboration, monitoring, and tool-chain pipelines are all at the heart of DevOps best practices. Along with the best tools, development and engineering teams have the opportunity to bring together a mindset change to build a better mousetrap. This means embracing the partner model as part of, not separate to, the DevOps culture. The payoff is a continuous approach to software services reliability that removes chaos and overhead, leads with automation, and achieves the scale that modern enterprises need to thrive today.

Leonid Belkind is Co-Founder and CTO at StackPulse
Share this

Industry News

May 15, 2025

GitLab announced the launch of GitLab 18, including AI capabilities natively integrated into the platform and major new innovations across core DevOps, and security and compliance workflows that are available now, with further enhancements planned throughout the year.

May 15, 2025

Perforce Software is partnering with Siemens Digital Industries Software to transform how smart, connected products are designed and developed.

May 15, 2025

Reply launched Silicon Shoring, a new software delivery model powered by Artificial Intelligence.

May 15, 2025

CIQ announced the tech preview launch of Rocky Linux from CIQ for AI (RLC-AI), an operating system engineered and optimized for artificial intelligence workloads.

May 14, 2025

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the launch of the Cybersecurity Skills Framework, a global reference guide that helps organizations identify and address critical cybersecurity competencies across a broad range of IT job families; extending beyond cybersecurity specialists.

May 14, 2025

CodeRabbit is now available on the Visual Studio Code editor.

The integration brings CodeRabbit’s AI code reviews directly into Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code at the earliest stages of software development—inside the code editor itself—at no cost to the developers.

May 14, 2025

Chainguard announced Chainguard Libraries for Python, an index of malware-resistant Python dependencies built securely from source on SLSA L2 infrastructure.

May 14, 2025

Sysdig announced the donation of Stratoshark, the company’s open source cloud forensics tool, to the Wireshark Foundation.

May 13, 2025

Pegasystems unveiled Pega Predictable AI™ Agents that give enterprises extraordinary control and visibility as they design and deploy AI-optimized processes.

May 13, 2025

Kong announced the introduction of the Kong Event Gateway as a part of their unified API platform.

May 13, 2025

Azul and Moderne announced a technical partnership to help Java development teams identify, remove and refactor unused and dead code to improve productivity and dramatically accelerate modernization initiatives.

May 13, 2025

Parasoft has added Agentic AI capabilities to SOAtest, featuring API test planning and creation.

May 13, 2025

Zerve unveiled a multi-agent system engineered specifically for enterprise-grade data and AI development.

May 12, 2025

LambdaTest, a unified agentic AI and cloud engineering platform, has announced its partnership with MacStadium(link is external), the industry-leading private Mac cloud provider enabling enterprise macOS workloads, to accelerate its AI-native software testing by leveraging Apple Silicon.

May 12, 2025

Tricentis announced a new capability that injects Tricentis’ AI-driven testing intelligence into SAP’s integrated toolchain, part of RISE with SAP methodology.