Our Partners

About our partnerships

DLM Consultants partner with:

DevOps is about people first and tools second – but tools make our lives an awful lot easier. You wouldn’t use Notepad as your primary C# IDE, and you shouldn’t use Excel spreadsheets to document your deployment checklists. It’s important to equip yourself with the right tools for the job.

DLM Consultants have experience stitching together a large variety of tools, typically with PowerShell, to create SQL Server DevOps pipelines within many different organisations around the world. For example, we’ve worked with all the following technologies and more:

  • Source control systems: Git, SVN, Perforce, TFS, VSTS
  • Build servers: JetBrains TeamCity, Atlassian Bamboo, Jenkins, TFS, VSTS
  • Release management servers: Octopus Deploy, Atlassian Bamboo, TFS, VSTS
  • Database tools: SSDT, Redgate SQL Toolbelt, Redgate ReadyRoll, FlyWay, DbUp, Apex, Idera

While we remain impartial and will always talk to clients before recommending a particular tool for a specific task, we do have a particularly strong relationship with a few of our favourite vendors. That’s not to say we will always recommend their stuff – no tool is the right choice 100% of the time. We will recommend different tools when they provide a more suitable solution in a given scenario. Often we will evaluate several different tools and pick the best.

We choose to partner with some tools vendors for the following reasons:

  • By using their tools and joining their partner networks we gain a better understanding of their software and we may get insights about their product roadmap.
  • By building stronger relationships with partners we are able to co-ordinate with their product and support teams more effectively and efficiently to create great solutions for our mutual clients.
  • DLM Consultants are often asked to recommend tools vendors and tools vendors are often asked to recommend consultants/trainers – so it helps both parties to build relationships with partners that they trust to provide high quality products/services.

We’ve chosen which vendors to partner with based on the following criteria:

  • We’ve had extensive experience using their stuff and have been very pleased with the results.
  • We consider their tools to generally offer the best value and quality in their category.
  • We have a personal relationship with people who work at these partners and are confident that the partners will provide quality products, first class technical support and will deal fairly with our clients should they experience problems.
  • These partners have confidence in us and experience working with us. We have an effective working relationship, allowing us to work together to provide fantastic solutions to our mutual clients.

DLM Consultants donate all financial incentives from our partners to charity.

Many tools vendors offer a financial incentive to partners who support their software sales. If DLM Consultants are offered a financial incentive by a partner we will donate it to charity. (Sometimes, for example when the charity is outside the EU, this may effect out tax liabilities. In that case we will hold on to just enough money to cover any increase in our tax liability at the end of the year.)

*

Redgate software (website) create some of the most popular and reliable tools for SQL Server that developers and DBAs can use to get a database into source control and deploy it with confidence. They play an active role in the SQL Server community and provide award winning technical support to their clients.

Before he created DLM Consultants, Alex Yates spent six years working for Redgate in various roles, but mostly as a pre-sales engineer. He has implemented the Redgate tools hundreds of times and knows most of the Redgate developers, support team and account executives on a first name basis. He is also on the ‘Friends of Redgate’ program so he gets a sneak peek at what’s on the roadmap and regularly spends evenings in pubs in Cambridge debating with the Redgate product managers about how Redgate can improve their tools further.

In 2014, while still working for Redgate, Alex teamed up with Steve Jones (b|t), Grant Fritchey (b|t) and one or two others to create a series of “DLM Workshops”. Since then Alex has continued to maintain and update the content and train other Redgate partners to deliver them on Redgate’s behalf. Nowadays DLM Consultants also deliver the content both online and in person. Read more here.

Redgate do not provide consultancy or professional services. Instead they partner with consultants and trainers that they have faith in. Alex Yates used to train Redgate partners up to the required standard. Now DLM Consultants are registered as a Redgate partner in their own right.

*

Alex has an interesting history with Octopus Deploy (website).

In 2012 Redgate licenced a copy of the Octopus Deploy source code with the rights to build a competitor product: Deployment Manager. Alex was part of the Deployment Manager team at Redgate, working as a pre-sales engineer and product champion. Octopus Deploy, while almost identical to Deployment Manager, was his direct competitor.

Octopus won by creating a smaller, leaner product and getting it to market more quickly. Redgate tried to do too much.

In 2014 Redgate admitted defeat with Deployment Manager and changed their business model, retiring Deployment Manager and entering a partnership with Octopus Deploy (and various other release management tools) in the process. Given the similarity between Deployment Manager and Octopus Deploy the companies were able to cooperate to migrate all the Deployment Manager users over to Octopus Deploy. As a Deployment Manager pre-sales engineer it was Alex’s role to support Redgate clients with this migration.

In the following years, Octopus Deploy continued to focus on building a fantastic deployment orchestration tool, and Redgate provided excellent database tools that could easily plug in to Octopus Deploy to handle the complexities of database deployments. This successful partnership continues to this day. For the remainder of his time at Redgate Alex continued to help Redgate customers to build SQL Server deployment pipelines using both Redgate and Octopus Deploy.

DLM Consultants also have experience using Octopus Deploy with Redgate competitor products. For example, Alex Yates wrote the Flyway step template for Octopus Deploy.

Octopus Deploy do not provide consultancy or professional services. Instead they partner with consultants and trainers that they have confidence in. When it comes to SQL Server deployments with Octopus Deploy the team at Octopus recommend DLM Consultants as their most experienced partner in that specific niche.