News
Borland Management Solutions Targets App Delivery
Borland expands its ALM suite with Borland Management Solutions,
aimed at improving software-delivery processes.
Borland Software Corp. plans to extend its application lifecycle management (ALM) offerings to include a suite targeting software delivery.
Slated for release this fall, Borland Management Solutions (BMS) will let organizations track, measure, predict and improve the performance of their software-delivery activities, according to the company.
More Visibility
BMS uses Borland's Open ALM Framework to let dev shops integrate the software-delivery management tooling into their existing infrastructures and process, says Rick Jackson, Borland's chief marketing officer and senior VP of corporate strategy.
"For every asset in the software lifecycle there's only one single source of truth for that asset," Jackson explains, noting that other solutions typically duplicate assets and then try to synchronize between products. "[The data] is stored physically in the native tool, then abstracted through SAME out into a logical store for access."
SAME stands for Single Asset Multiple Environments, the abstraction layer in the Open ALM Framework that provides a bi-directional linking service through which assets and information can be manipulated in their native ALM repositories. SAME lets BMS plug into existing ALM tooling and provide an ALM "cockpit" view of the entire app lifecycle.
The approach promises to shine a light on a dark area of the dev lifecycle, says Matt Klassen, Borland's director of product marketing for BMS.
"When we ask our customers how they track and improve their software-delivery processes, they basically tell us that they really don't have much visibility into that process," Klassen says. "BMS as a whole is bringing visibility, metrics and decision support for software organizations to a new level."
Three-Headed Coin
Borland BMS consists of three components. TeamDemand is an environment designed to facilitate collaboration among business stakeholders and software teams. The idea is to align software delivery with business priorities by giving business users a view of what the dev team is doing. It provides a real-time tracking system for monitoring the status and progress of requests and projects.
"It's the FedEx tracking system for IT projects," says Jackson.
TeamFocus enables enterprise-project management by providing management with real-time visibility without disrupting the work of development teams. The component additionally supports diverse project methodologies-agile, waterfall and iterative-presenting reports in the specific context of the methodology being employed.
TeamAnalytics provides business intelligence functionality, taking data gathered from multiple ALM tools over time to enable robust trending. The module includes configurable dashboards that present a range of industry-standard ALM metrics.
Critical to the success of the new platform will be the availability of connectors linking BMS to third-party software from Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Microsoft and others, as well as Borland's own ALM tools suite. Jackson says Borland is working with third parties to produce connectors for a wide range of products.
Borland has not yet determined licensing and pricing terms for BMS, though Jackson says the company currently intends to sell the three modules as discrete products. "The intent now for the first version is to have a version of each of the three products. Customers can buy one, two or three of the products," he explains.
About the Author
John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at [email protected].