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Copado Adds Government-Specific DevOps Tools to Salesforce

In order to meet growing demand for government apps, such as those for telework or contact-tracing, Copado has created a new set of tools with scale, compliance, security and other needs in mind.

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As COVID-19 moved telework and digital services from novel to essential in a matter of weeks, the demand and stakes of digital transformation projects for government have rarely been higher. The sheer number and scale of projects around the country has made 2020 a moment of truth for digital government, and the software and consulting company Copado has a new set of app development tools it hopes will help public agencies rise to meet it.

The company announced in a news release today the launch of Copado Government Cloud, not a new cloud service but a set of DevOps tools — software that helps organize the efforts of dozens or even hundreds of people in the process of developing and then operating apps — that are specially designed to accommodate needs of government. According to Copado Senior Vice President of Marketing Andrew Leigh, Copado runs natively inside the Salesforce platform, which is what governments use to actually build the apps, but Copado coordinates all the efforts of people involved so the end result is secure, compliant and released on time, even if it’s a huge project. He likened Salesforce to an engine that builds the apps, while Copado is the gear shift that moves them forward.

Leigh said DevOps, as a set of practices and tools, is becoming increasingly useful with the growing need for quick turnaround on applications for COVID-related tasks such as remote work and contact tracing.

“When we look at many of these projects, we’re dealing with upwards of 500 developers, administrators, architects and system integrators. All their development needs to be coordinated, it needs to be aligned in order to speed up the time-to-value of an application to market, and that’s what Copado does,” he said. “We install Copado in your Salesforce org, and it automatically integrates to all of your metadata, to all of your project information. It’s automatically available to everybody on your delivery team, and everything that’s exposed through Copado — including our DevOps 360 analytics, which are dashboards to manage the entire project — are available natively within the Salesforce user experience.”

The news release said Copado was founded in 2013, its software handles more than 50 million transactions per month, and its customers include the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the states of California, Kansas, Massachusetts, Missouri and Vermont, the Louisiana Department of Health, the District of Columbia and several international agencies.

Besides the new government-focused DevOps tools, Copado simultaneously announced a new partnership today: the IT retailer Carahsoft will be Copado’s public sector distributor. Leigh said this is intended to expedite the procurement process, and therefore reduce time-to-market with urgent citizen-facing projects to a week, if need be.

“That was unheard of just six months ago, before the pandemic, but nowadays we’re seeing that level of need from government agencies,” he said. “They need to stand up call centers, COVID-tracing applications and other new projects, and they need them in a matter of a few weeks, so that’s why that relationship with Carahsoft is to streamline procurement. And of course the technology itself is cloud-based, so we’re able to get these people up, live and working in a matter of days and weeks.”

Andrew Westrope is managing editor of the Center for Digital Education. Before that, he was a staff writer for Government Technology, and previously was a reporter and editor at community newspapers. He has a bachelor’s degree in physiology from Michigan State University and lives in Northern California.