Executive Spotlight
To Our Valued Customers,
In my experiences over the years, I’ve seen the typical IT organization spend millions procuring best-of-breed software development tools designed to increase the predictability and success rate of software delivery projects. However, I’m sure most of you can attest to the fact that delivering software that lives up to its initial promise is still rarely achieved. Project cancellations and failures have become ubiquitous. Cost overruns, schedule slippages, low quality and poor reliability have become disturbing norms in the software industry.
As such, many people still characterize software development as more art than science — sometimes even a dark art. Consequently, more than ever before, software development organizations are under increased pressure to be more mature and adopt systematic and process-centric approaches to software delivery that follow the steps of more traditional engineering disciplines.
As we know, this increased pressure to achieve consistent and predictable value from software projects marked the emergence of Application Lifecycle Management, or ALM, as a new market category and as a software development discipline.
Today ALM is an established and growing industry segment. ALM vendors provide a wide array of tools and technologies to support the process of software delivery. The unfortunate truth, however, is that while ALM vendors are making progress towards offering solutions that truly fulfill the promise of ALM, to-date ALM solutions have produced mixed results. To understand why, one need only to take a close look at the ways in which many vendors have approached ALM — aggressively promoting restrictive, end-to-end offerings that aimed to lock customers into proprietary IT platforms.
For the IT organization, the resulting choices were less than ideal. You could manage your delivery process using disparate tools for different roles/platforms with little orchestration and no ability to track the overall progress of the project. Or, you could rip and replace your existing tools with a monolithic platform (perhaps abandoning any established processes in the trade), and put your trust—and your professional reputation—in the hands of a single vendor whose agenda may or may not align with your own.
With this in mind, new trends are unfolding in ALM, called ALM 2.0. To help customers better understand the implications of ALM 2.0, and how Borland with its Open ALM approach is implementing it, I recently participated in a podcast discussion moderated by Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions and featuring Carey Schwaber, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, and Brian Kilcourse, CEO of the Retail Systems Alert Group and former SVP and CIO of Longs Drug Stores.
I strongly encourage you to listen to the podcast, or read the full transcript. I’m confident it will provide some valuable insights on the current state of the ALM market, why today’s ALM solutions fall short of truly delivering on the promise of ALM, and how Borland – with our Open ALM approach and dedication to transforming software delivery into a managed, efficient and predictable business process – is driving the next generation of ALM solutions by empowering customers to deliver software on their terms, using their processes, their tools and their platforms.
All the best,
Marc Brown
Vice President of Product Marketing
Borland Software