In the technology world these days, when someone says that it’s time to shift left, they usually aren’t talking about lining up their friends for a selfie shot. Instead, shift left is an approach that places development tasks, such as monitoring, testing and automation, earlier in the digital workload lifecycle. With the recent introduction of a new standalone development environment called Control-M Workbench, BMC Software Inc. has definitely shifted left.

“Developers want to be able to quickly build and test and show value. We said that it’s time to shift automation left and allow companies to build automation as an artifact very early in the development lifecycle,” said Basil Faruqui (pictured), solutions marketing manager at BMC Software.

Faruqui stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and James Kobielus (@jameskobielus) during the recent BigData NYC event in New York City. They discussed the importance of automation in the development process and how one customer was applying BMC’s technology at scale. (* Disclosure below.)

Jobs-as-Code can accelerate enterprise innovation

The underlying goal of a shift-left approach is to accelerate innovation. BMC believes this will happen through a Jobs-as-Code tool, which automates and standardizes job scheduling as part of the Control-M release.

“You can build entire complex data pipelines in code format so that you can implement continuous integration,” Faruqui explained. “You don’t have to compromise speed and quality for end-to-end visibility and enterprise-grade automation.”

One of BMC’s customers is Navistar International Corp., the global truck fleet manufacturer. Navistar has been using Control-M for nearly 20 years to automate virtually every business function, and it recently applied the BMC product to a major predictive maintenance project involving 325,000 vehicles.

“They have not had to rearchitect their strategy as they grow and scale,” Faruqui said. “When you are choosing Control-M as a platform for automation, you are choosing a mature solution.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData NYC 2017. (* Disclosure: BMC Software Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither BMC Software nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE