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| Vol. 8, No. 7 |
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Compuware Unveils Changepoint 12 Compuware Corp. recently upgraded its Changepoint IT portfolio management application with new features that boost IT’s ability to collaborate with the business units it serves on project decision-making, prioritization, and risk analysis. Today’s reality is that the wall between management and IT is gone. From fixing printers to multimillion-dollar projects, IT is responsible for a broad range of ever-changing tasks, many of which compete for time and resources, and Changepoint 12 involves business units in the decision-making process instead of leaving them in the dark, according to Lori Ellsworth, Compuware’s director of product management. Version 12 deepens business customer involvement in IT decision-making processes by enabling the customer to define alternate what-if scenarios for different work combinations and compare the relative impacts on services and resources graphically via bar and pie charts. Version 12 also expands the client functionality of its portal, keeping clients involved throughout the process, from submitting requests to winning funding approval, tracking milestones and submitting change requests, even tracking smaller project “dependencies” affected by larger ones, Ellsworth adds. “This gives IT the ability to communicate to the customer, ‘Here’s the money, this is the work we’ve done and how much it cost. And here’s the business benefit,’” she says. Pricing starts at approximately $55,000. For more information, go to: Electric Cloud Adds Reporting, Analytics Electric Cloud has introduced new versions of its software production management products, adding multi-level reporting and analytics across the board. Collectively, its three products automate, accelerate and analyze the software build, package, test, and deploy process, working much faster and generating a more repeatable process than homegrown scripts, according to CEO Mike Maciag. Specifically, ElectricCommander automates the software build and release process while ElectricAccelerator executes parallel builds across clusters of inexpensive servers, greatly enhancing speed. ElectricInsight is a visualization tool providing job-level detail of software builds. Collectively, they answer questions such as: Did yesterday’s builds work? What is their track record over time? How many servers are working? Are we on track? Electric Cloud’s products can drill directly to find the source of a failure, retrieving the answer in minutes versus hours, and keep the build process going, Maciag says. With the new versions, Commander now includes project summaries, variant trends and daily reports for better management decision-making. Commander and Accelerator added new reports on the production process itself, and Commander and Insight provide detailed data about specific builds, including time to build, a manifest of build components, and the location of dependencies. Pricing starts at $50,000. For more information, go to:
With the release of Version 5.0 of its Compliance Manager product, business process management (BPM) software provider Appian has extended its compliance management software beyond Sarbanes-Oxley compliance to include support for myriad compliance requirements. “The intent was to try and have an approach that would allow a company or organization to manage all of its compliance initiatives inside of one software instance,” explains Marc Wilson, Appian co-founder and VP of professional services. Appian’s approach emphasizes the role of BPM in helping any organization with its compliance effort. “We not only provide an out-of-the-box framework for managing compliance, but also allow you to apply BPM to compliance issues,” Wilson says. The BPM abilities let users map out other processes to manage compliance efforts and allow those processes to work together using what Appian calls “Active Control Monitoring.” Compliance Manager 5.0 can scale up or down based on what an organization needs, thus giving users more control. Users are just changing processes, not changing code, Wilson notes. “We push the notion that once you get the system set up, there’s no IT involvement necessary,” he adds. The end user can alter the application as he or she sees fit. Pricing starts at $125,000 based on the number of users. A quick-start package includes a 30-day implementation process. For more information, go to:
IT asset management software provider Express Metrix has enhanced three main areas in Version 8.0 of its Express Software Manager product: administration, shared use, and support. The product comprises three pieces: a back-end database, a Web service that runs on Microsoft ILS, and clients that communicate with that Web service, collecting software inventory, hardware inventory, and software usage data. The data that gets collected is passed through the Web service on ILS and then passed on to the database. The goal here is accountability for IT, according to Jeff Kelsey, Express Metrix VP of products and services. “We’re enabling them to be accountable for their assets.” The latest version includes added features to the product’s metering technology, which has the capability to prevent applications from launching, detecting when applications are started and shut down, and when applications are being used when running on a desktop rather than sitting idle. The upgrade has beefed-up security so that client data can be encrypted. It also includes the capability to track additional assets like routers and switches. The product is priced at $40 per seat with a minimum purchase of 25 seats. Volume discounts are available. For more
information, go to: SoftwareGram coverage in this issue from Pam Derringer and Lana Gates. For your calendar:
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