One Complete Solution
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One Complete Solution
The new
offering aligns with HP's stated plans for the Mercury acquisition, which was
to combine HP's
existing OpenView offerings with Mercury's BTO (Business Technology
Optimization) Enterprise offerings to integrate the many
building blocks of enterprise IT management into one complete solution for the
entire IT life cycle-from planning through to deployment and operations.
The ALM 11 platform and software solutions are components of HP Application
Transformation. Through these solutions, HP aims to
transform applications and processes designed for another era, helping
enterprises gain control over aging applications and inflexible processes that
challenge innovation and agility by governing their responsiveness and pace of
change. Application Transformation solutions help businesses and governments in
their pursuit of an Instant-On Enterprise.
West, as well as Veghte and other HP officials, said there
is a major difference between HP's ALM solution and ALP products from competitors
such as Microsoft, with its Visual Studio Team System, and IBM, with its Jazz and Rational Team
Concert tools. The key difference, they said, is that Microsoft, IBM and others treat the developer as
the central player in the ALM scheme of things. However, HP does not single out
the developer as king, but gives equal status to other stakeholders in the SDLC
process. Beyond that, the HP platform is not tied to a particular operating
system or development environment.
"With ALM 11, business analysts, QA [quality assurance]
analysts, security professionals, developers and others can all go to this
unified system," said Mark Sarbiewski, vice president of products for BTO
applications at HP.
"We come at the application life cycle from our core
competency of quality, performance and life-cycle management," said Jonathan
Rende, vice president and general manager of BTO applications. "We come at ALM
delivery from a core competency that is very different from others who come at
it from a development perspective. We are stack-agnostic."
"We're not seeing a big, single repository story like with IBM Rational or Microsoft," Forrester's
West said. "It looks to be more of a federated, integrated story. IBM and Microsoft have some bias toward
their own platform. This [ALM 11] is not tied to Java or .Net.
"What we see is that
it's important to support a different repository. Subversion [an open-source
revision control system or repository] is the most prevalent. HP ALM does
support it [by enabling users to use Subversion
instead of moving to a proprietary repository]. So what's important is the change
management hub, not the repository or the IDE."
Moreover, taking a knock at his former employer, Veghte
said, "One area where I see opportunity is when I'm with customers having a
conversation." He explained that you can't claim that everything is Windows or
everything is C# and .Net because the world doesn't work that way. "Instead of
saying the unifying concept is .Net, the unifying concept is the requirement,"
he added. "And it can go from the start of the development process all the way
to the end."
