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Borland to Add BI to ALM Solutions
Borland will add BI capabilities to its Open ALM solutions.
Borland Software Corp. plans to integrate business intelligence (BI) capabilities into its Open Application Lifecycle Management (Open ALM) solutions in 2008. Marc Brown, Borland's vice president of marketing, explains that the BI capabilities will be added across the company's Open ALM solutions.
"We'll be delivering a platform in mid-2008 that will help facilitate the automatic collection of the various data points across the lifecycle into a centralized data warehouse that can be used for reporting and dashboarding," Brown says. "We're going to be shipping this into a number of product offerings focused on portfolio and analytics -- some around project management, some around demand management."
The names of the new products will be announced early in 2008, he adds. For now, Brown says they all fall under the general nomenclature of "Borland's business intelligence offering for ALM."
Borland's Open ALM strategy for connecting disparate tools in the enterprise has earned praise from analysts. However, the open approach faces obstacles due in part to a lack of cooperation among ALM vendors.
"The problem is that the ALM vendors have not come together and said, 'This is going to be a standard interface that we're all going to use,'" says Michael Azoff, senior research analyst at the Butler Group. "Borland is making steps in that direction [and] it'll be interesting to see how far that progresses. My view is that if the ALM vendors are going to grow their market, which is limited at the moment, they've all got to work together."
New Terrain
Azoff describes Borland's initiative as somewhat distinct from traditional BI and more akin to enabling "application intelligence." The missing piece to make it work so far has been the use of a common repository for mining the information, he adds.
Borland Open ALM is new terrain for a company still best known for its Turbo Pascal and JBuilder IDEs. The company faces a challenge as its ALM offering is squeezed between smaller open source tools vendors and large platform companies, such as Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and Microsoft, that "aren't really interested in necessarily interoperating with other people's tool stacks," explains Thomas E. Murphy, a Gartner Inc. research director.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.