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HP continues to extend its enterprise software strategy, adding new application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities as well as enhanced support for agile software development and project management.
HP announced new software as a service (SaaS) solutions that speed application delivery and provide visibility, collaboration and agility across stove-piped or geographically dispersed application development and operations teams.
HP announced two new offerings, HP Agile Manager and HP Performance Anywhere, and said a third, HP Portfolio and Project Management (PPM) 9.2, will be coming soon.
HP Agile Manager accelerates application time to market with an intuitive, Web-based experience that offers visibility for planning, executing and tracking agile development projects, said Subbu Iyer, vice president of product strategy for HP Software. Meanwhile, HP Performance Anywhere proactively resolves application performance issues before they impact business services through an on-demand solution that provides visibility and predictive analytics, he added.
HP Agile Manager also unifies and promotes collaboration with visibility into tasks, metrics and progress—whether for a single group or for multiple, geographically distributed teams across the enterprise.
“HP Agile Manager is a purpose-built SaaS solution for agile project management,” Iyer said. “We tried to mimic how developers work in reality
The new service enables users to simplify planning and capacity management across Agile teams by providing insight into projects, including the status of tasks and potential issues or bottlenecks impacting progress.
In addition, with the tool, users can enhance insight into application quality with advanced source-code and build-management analytics for traceability, rapid assessment of change and risk analysis, HP said.
The new agile management solution also helps foster collaboration through integrated development environment (IDE) integrations that allow developers to work with the tool of their choice, yet still work together to share information with other team members. And it helps to improve visibility into projects with real-time updates via customizable dashboards, which include metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).
HP Agile Manager also provides two-way synchronization with HP application lifecycle management (ALM) and HP Quality Center for enterprise quality management and continuous testing capabilities.
“As Specsavers’ business rapidly expands to provide new services for our customers, we must maintain a positive brand image and strong operational excellence,” Jason Taylor, head of testing and environment management services at Specsavers, said in a statement. “HP Agile Manager, together with HP ALM, provides increased visibility across application development and testing for better collaboration and risk control.”
HP Performance Anywhere monitors applications across the Web, via the cloud and in mobile environments. Now delivered as a service, it improves application performance while reducing up-front costs and lengthy implementations. With the service, users can achieve faster time to value with automated, self-provisioned management and a simple-to-use interface.
The service also helps improve brand equity with smart analytics that understand historic norms and detect abnormal performance to proactively identify potential problems. And users also can rapidly resolve performance issues using an embedded social collaboration technology that allows development, testing and operations teams to work together and remediate application failures that may have resulted in production.
“Our customers want to really practice DevOps,” Iyer said.
HP Delivers Enterprise Agility With New SaaS Offerings
HP Performance Anywhere integrates with HP Agile Manager and HP Quality Center to further promote collaboration across development, test and operations teams to better align IT with business priorities. Both HP Agile Manager and HP Performance Anywhere are part of the HP Converged Cloud strategy.
“Providing patients with on-demand access to important health care information is fundamental to delivering quality member services,” Jason Siegrist, manager of the enterprise management team at Sentara Healthcare, said in a statement. “With the predictive analytics of HP Performance Anywhere, we can proactively monitor the health of our Web-based applications to ensure that our patients can always access their personal medical information via our Website, or have the ability to find a doctor and make virtual appointments 24/7.”
“Enterprise agility results from the ability to quickly deploy simple-to-use, on-demand tools that provide visibility and collaboration across the application life cycle,” Iyer said in a statement. “Together, HP Agile Manager and HP Performance Anywhere provide intuitive, collaborative and analytical capabilities needed to enable development and operation teams to deliver business-driven results.”
HP Agile Manager is available now. Pricing is by subscription and starts at $39 per user, per month with a three-month term. HP Performance Anywhere is expected to be available soon. Pricing, by subscription, is expected to start at $39 per application transaction monitored per month, and $199 per server and virtual machine for Application Server monitored.
Meanwhile, HP also shed light on HP Portfolio and Project Management (PPM) 9.2, the latest version of its project and portfolio management system, which will be announced later in February. Integrated with HP Agile Manager, HP PPM 9.2 enables organizations to support and prioritize dozens of fast-paced projects while still achieving the alignment of IT priorities with business objectives. The new release features an improved user experience, said Bruce Randall, director of product marketing for project and portfolio management at HP. HP PPM 9.2 provides real-time visibility into all application development activities for both traditional and agile development initiatives.
In addition, enhancements to HP PPM 9.2 enable clients to reduce operational costs through embedded integrations with HP ALM and HP QC, enabling organizations to prioritize tasks, efficiently manage resources and automate key administrative activities throughout the application lifecycle. The enhancements also improve employee productivity through a new mobile time-management application that allows project managers to connect to corporate time-management systems remotely, Randall said.
“We focus on everything portfolio and project management is about—all the facets,” Randall said. “HP PPM 9.2 delivers several things we built with our customers’ and the market’s needs in mind, such as an always-on Web interface. We’ll also have the new mobile app on iOS and Android soon after the launch. This release gives you the ability to determine resource capacity and assignments and create a governance process.”
Moreover, Randall said the combination of HP PPM and HP Agile Manager presents a “holistic way to manage all types of projects.” The integration allows users to find and assign appropriate resources, and it helps users manage nonagile components of projects, such as sales and marketing staff, he said.