HP rolls out ALM 11 in Barcelona to expand managed automation for modern applications

Barcelona -- In the midst of what it calls a new wave of application modernization in the enterprise, HP on Tuesday rolled out the latest version of its application lifecycle management (ALM) platform here at the Software Universe conference.

The Application Lifecycle Management 11 platform works to automate application modernization from requirements management through quality and performance. HP sees this as an important innovation in a market where Forrester Consulting predicts 69 percent of IT decision-makers have earmarked 25 percent of their annual IT budget for application modernization—and 30 percent will dedicate over half their budget to the cause. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“Sixty-seven percent of organizations that have kick-started application modernization projects are failing,” says Jonathan Rende, vice president and general manager of the Applications Solutions business for HP Software & Solutions division. “Application teams that have to build, provision and create new critical business processes can’t keep up because they are relying on the old ways of doing things instead of the new way.”

HP application transformation

The ALM 11 platform and software solutions are part of that “new way.” Components of the HP Application Transformation solutions, these tools work to help enterprises gain control over aging applications and inflexible processes that challenge innovation and agility -- by governing their responsiveness and pace of change. It’s all part of the Instant-On Enterprise that embeds technology into everything it does. ALM 11 essentially automates workflow processes across multiple teams. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

“Applications are central to everything CIOs are doing right now,” Rende says. “It’s literally how companies are differentiating themselves -- and doing so in more efficient and effective ways with more value added. ALM 11 creates a single, unified system that allows business analysts, developers, security professionals, quality professionals and performance professionals to collaborate.”

By establishing this set of criteria, everybody can see what is coming and what the status is, and why there are changes if there are changes.

[Read an interview with HP's Mark Sarbiewski on the uses and benefits of the new ALM portfolio.]

Rende also points to benefits such as risk-based decisions of application releases via ALM Project Planning and Tracking capabilities, rapid application delivery with HP Agile Accelerator 4.0, reduced business risk from application failures, and automatic import of business process models (BPM) into ALM’s Requirements Management to visualize business process flows and augment textual requirements.

Rend notes that HP isn’t working in a vacuum, either. “Everybody has a mix of different applications and environments. Many times they are cobbling them together and integrating because the business processes that are critical cut across many different systems,” Rende says. “Our solution is agnostic to the technologies.”

Release Management

Another major focus of ALM 11 is Release Management -- the ability for program and project managers to establish milestones and criteria and measurements in real-time. The module works to answer the questions, “What’s coming?” and “Is it ready?” or “Has it been tested successfully?”

“Many requirements for new apps come from production, and DevOps sit on that line between operations and applications,” Rende says. “By establishing this set of criteria, release milestones, and GANTT charts, everybody can see what is coming and what the status is, and why there are changes if there are changes.”

HP ALM platform also offers new versions of HP Quality Center and Performance Center 11. These solutions work to help simplify and automate application quality and performance validation to lower operational costs, freeing up investments to innovating applications in the delivery phase.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

You may also be interested in:

• Dave Shirk details how HP's Instant-On Enterprise initiative takes aim at shifting demands on business and governments
  
  
• New book explores automating the managed applications lifecycle to accelerate delivery of business applications
  
  
• Automating the managed application lifecycle helps Delta Air Lines better deliver critical business applications
  
  
• How to automate ALM: Conclusions from new HP book on gaining improved business applications as a process

The adaptive web: Helping to bridge the CIO-CMO divide

This guest post comes courtesy of Dr. Scott Brave, co-founder and CTO of Baynote, a provider of digital marketing optimization solutions. He can be reached at brave@baynote.com.

By Dr. Scott Brave

CIO and CMO. Until very recently, many still believed these two roles couldn’t be more extreme in their differences. The stereotypical CMO was creative and guided by gut feel, whereas the CIO was steadfast, risk averse and driven by empirical evidence.

The emergence of the real-time web and its impact on customer expectations has pulled these two seemingly polar opposite disciplines much closer together. Real-time services like Twitter, Facebook and improved behavioral targeting technologies are pushing consumer expectations for instant, extremely personalized experiences to an all-time high.

This trend has forced the CIO and CMO to work in lockstep on digital marketing initiatives aimed at staying as close as possible to what the customer wants.

However, the reality is that while both sides understand their shared goals depend on working with the other, the relationship between the CIO and CMO is more often not a happy marriage. According to the CMO Council’s recent CMO-CIO Alignment Imperative report, there is a good amount of consensus among CMOs and CIOs on the central role of technology in improving the customer experience, but neither group feels like they are getting the job done.

Biggest struggle

Their single biggest struggle has become all about figuring out ways to adapt the experience – across the web as well as via mobile and email – to seemingly insatiable user expectations. This sentiment is consistent with recent M&A activity that signals the importance of web optimization technology: Adobe acquired Omniture last September; and IBM has gobbled up CoreMetrics, Unica, and most recently, Netezza for $1.7B.

The reality, however, is that current optimization approaches are still very manual and provide a rear-view mirror look at customer intent, making it impossible to target the customer in an accurate and scalable way. Alas, the CIO/CMO dilemma continues.

What we need is to build a smarter approach that allows companies to adapt to their customers’ needs in real-time.

What we need is to build a smarter approach that allows companies to adapt to their customers’ needs in real-time. The concept of collective intelligence, which I’ll address below, will be critical to achieving this vision -- something I like to think of as an “adaptive web.” That is, a digital experience that is always relevant and based on users’ current intent and interests. It also must be device-agnostic, especially important given the increased mobility of the online experience -- a challenge analyst firm Forrester calls “the Splinternet.”

The adaptive web is in fact central to what Gartner calls “Context-Aware Computing”, the idea that social analytics and computing will produce knowledge about individual context and preferences, allowing companies to predict and serve them what they want. According to Gartner, this model adapts interactions with the customer based on context, in contrast to today’s experience which is very reactive.

So, how close are we to building a truly end-to-end adaptive web?

To no surprise, there are numerous technical and psychological challenges for building an adaptive web. Namely, I see three primary roadblocks:

• Privacy Issues: To deliver adaptive experiences, we have to pay attention to what people are doing online in the first place. Different users have varying levels of comfort. We’ll have to find some sort of middle ground where the value of an adaptive experience greatly outweighs users’ privacy concerns.
  
  
• Deciding on the Method: Second, there’s determining the approach itself. Do we need a “metalayer” over the web? Some sort of toolbar or plug-in that could connect users’ entire web experiences across devices? Do ISPs need to get involved at the network level to watch every site users’ visit and how they engage with it? These are all options to consider – some more realistic than others - but the path is murky at best at this point.
  
  
• Determining Users’ Intents: The third obstacle is the biggest obstacle of all: pure science. It’s not a trivial problem to automatically pinpoint and serve up an experience based on a user’s current intent and context. As someone who has devoted his life’s work to studying human/computer interaction, I can’t emphasize this enough. Predicting what people want and need, and adapting their web experience in real-time is perhaps one of the remaining “big picture” challenges facing technologists.
  

Collective intelligence

Let’s revisit collective intelligence and its role in making the adaptive web a reality. Collective intelligence refers to the process of gathering insight from a group of like-minded individuals online, often implicitly, based on their shared navigation and engagement patterns. A central concept of collective intelligence is to aggregate behaviors of the silent majority of visitors across the spectrum of digital channels, augment that information with the expertise of super-users and provide the most relevant information that meets every individual user’s goals.

Not doing so will have profound implications for their organizations, most notably lost revenues and customer loyalty.

An obvious benefit to using collective intelligence is one of mere scale: it enables machines to draw conclusions about an individual's current intent based on the knowledge and experiences of the larger community. It also gives us the power to efficiently deliver automated and real-time experiences to users. This would be very difficult within any user-by-user scenario, which again poses enormous difficulties in matters of scale.

The CIO and CMO understand why their success depends on better IT/marketing alignment. Now, the challenge will be for them to deliver. While there’s no silver bullet, I believe collective intelligence has the potential to help them form a much more harmonious and strategic partnership. CIOs and CMOs must formulate their strategies for collective intelligence, context-aware computing and other technologies enabling the adaptive web right away.

Not doing so will have profound implications for their organizations, most notably lost revenues and customer loyalty.

This guest post comes courtesy of Dr. Scott Brave, co-founder and CTO of Baynote, a provider of digital marketing optimization solutions. He can be reached at brave@baynote.com.

You may also be interested in:

• Why HTML5 enables more businesses to deliver more apps to more mobile devices with greater ease
  
  
• Analysts define business value and imperatives for cloud-based B2B commerce
  
  
• Web data services -- here's why text-based content access and management plays crucial role in real-time BI

ThinPrint works to take cloud printing to mainstream

With companies putting more applications and data into Internet clouds, cloud printing is gaining momentum in the enterprise.

Vendors large and small are getting into the game. HP has made major announcements while Google has hinted at the future. Apple has begun services for iOS devices. Smaller companies like HubCast and ThinPrint have entered the fray. Yet, for all the attention, though, cloud printing is still not mainstream.

BriefingsDirect recently caught up with Thorsten Hesse, manager of Innovative Products for ThinPrint, to discuss the business drivers of cloud computing, the various options available, and the obstacles to wider-spread adoption of the technology.

BriefingsDirect: What are the business drivers of cloud printing adoption?

Hesse: In general, talking about printing is quite boring for most people. But people want to print. They need to print. They don’t want to talk about it, but they want to use it. They just want it to work.

Companies spend a lot of money for new printers, for printer management and print driver administration, for unused print outs, unnecessary paper and toner consumption, and for support and help desk. Printing is one of the most cost-intensive things in IT. Many companies also don’t want to be locked in with a specific vendor.

Increasing use

Another aspect is the increasing use of cloud applications and services. How do you print from cloud offerings like Salesforce or Google Apps? Mostly you create a PDF. Well, then you need a device that can print PDFs. Additionally, the use of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices becomes more and more common, and these devices can‘t do that, or only in limited quality.

Altogether, there are at least six business drivers for cloud printing:

• Printing is one of the most cost intensive IT services—and cloud printing can save cost and enhance productivity at the same time.
  
• Printing technology today depends highly on printer manufacturers.
  
• Companies want print on demand.
  
• Companies use cloud applications, very often unplanned.
  
• Employees are becoming increasingly mobile.
  
• Employees use new types of devices.

BriefingsDirect: What are the different options for cloud printing in terms of delivery?

Hesse: There’re three different delivery models. First, there is private cloud software. The first delivery model is that we sell software to our customers that they install in their environment, for example in their data center or on an Amazon server in the cloud.

This might sound far off, but as soon as customers manage their internal desktops from the cloud with Microsoft Intune, it will be a logical step to do the same with the printers.

They buy, own, and control the software. The other end of the spectrum is a pure cloud printing service. And then in the middle we've got the hybrid cloud, where some parts are run internally in the private cloud and others in the public cloud.

BriefingsDirect: Is cloud printing secure? What makes is it secure?

Hesse: First of all, the user can print content without needing to store it on the device, which brings all the advantages of central data storage -- secure and updated data in one place, no files lost when device is lost, and availability of service. The user can trigger the print job to the printer. He can also identify the printer.

BriefingsDirect: How is cloud printing evolving?

Hesse: Our solution is evolving in many directions. On top of offering print management as a software product that the customer can purchase and install internally, we’ll offer it as a cloud service. This will be a public cloud service. Customers can run it from the cloud. They can then control their internal printing environment from the cloud.

This might sound far off, but as soon as customers manage their internal desktops from the cloud with Microsoft Intune, it will be a logical step to do the same with the printers. This will evolve into a complete print management solution that can then be used not only to control the printing environment, but to build in policies to enhance it along the way.

BriefingsDirect: What is holding businesses back from adopting cloud printing?

Hesse: They mostly don’t know what’s possible, as the discussion is fogged by limited public cloud printing solutions.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

You may also be interested in:

• HP eyes automated apps development, 'standardized' private cloud creation with integrated CloudStart package
  
  
• Financial services firms look to cloud, grid, and cluster to allay fears over data explosion, says survey
  
  
• Cloud computing's ultimate value depends on open PaaS models to avoid applications and data lock-in

InfoBoom seeks US IT pros to take telephone survey, get stipend

The Infoboom, a site to which I regularly contribute for pay, is doing some research to learn more about how IT and business technology professionals meet their information needs.

The research involves a one-hour telephone interview and they are offering $100 American Express gift certificates to people who complete the survey.

Apply to be interviewed here.

You must be based in the U.S. and you must have significant involvement with business technology, but other than that they are pretty flexible.

This is not a marketing pitch and nobody's going to try to sell you anything. IBM, which underwrites the site, just really wants to know more about what its audience needs. Thanks!

How to automate ALM: Conclusions from new HP book on gaining improved business applications as a process

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers new methods and insights for dramatic business services delivery improvement.

The topic of ALM will be a big one at next week's HP Software Universe conference in Barcelona. In anticipation, join us as we explore application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices for overall business services delivery improvement.

In this discussion, the last in a series of three, we underscore the conclusions from the forthcoming book and explain how organizations can begin now to change how they deliver and maintain applications in a fast-changing world.

Complexity, silos of technology and culture, and a shifting landscape of application delivery options have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications approaches. In the forthcoming book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors evaluate the role and impact of automation and management over an application's lifecycle, as well as delve into the need to gain better control over applications through a holistic governance perspective.

In our first podcast, we focused on the role and impact of automation and management of applications, and emphasized the need to gain control over applications through a holistic lifecycle perspective.

The second discussion in the series looked at how an enterprise, Delta Air Lines, moved successfully to improve its applications’ quality, and gain the ability to deliver better business results from those applications.

Finally, we're here now with the book’s authors to explore their conclusions. Please join me in welcoming Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications, and Brad Hipps, Senior Manager of Solution Marketing for HP Applications. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Sarbiewski: The life of an application is generally the same for all companies. There is a spark of an idea: "We need this. We need software to help us do something in the business."

We make an investment decision somehow. We may do this ad hoc. We may do it based on who screams the loudest. But somehow a decision gets made. We build something somehow. We spec it, build it, release it, run it, poorly or not, and hopefully, although certainly not always, eventually we replace it, retire it, and so forth.

We wanted to take a slightly different approach to how we thought about maturity models. There are lots of them in the industry, not so much around ALM, but in sub-disciplines or in different areas. Our focus was the business outcomes that you see at different levels.

We built out a model for ALM maturity, and it’s in the book.

... We see pressure from the business to change how we do things and the technologies we use. From the business side, you see it in a variety of ways. You see, "Oh, it’s the consumerization of IT, and what I see in my consumer world I want in IT. I see this all moving fast and I don’t feel my business moving." You see that pressure.

But, you absolutely see pressure to change from the bottom-up, from the teams themselves. We want to work in a different way. We want to be able to execute faster. The whole move of agile has been, in large part, if not primarily built, then driven from development and delivery teams up. So, there is a huge motivation there.

If you can understand the results that you are seeing, that ought to help you figure out where you could be. What we've seen is a progression from the spectrum of companies, ... [many] have fairly immature processes.

We see people just getting started, and they have a relatively ad hoc, narrow, point tool, with lots of manual work. It doesn’t mean they are never successful, but results vary highly. They're very mixed. Some project teams are great, and it all depends on the project team, and the next one may stink.

So our idea around maturity -- and tying it to outcomes -- is the results that we see. ... It all comes back to the results. What kind of results am I seeing? If you look at the model in the book, it’s pretty easy to peg yourself as to where you are and the kinds of benefits you'd see from moving up that maturity curve.

There’s a lot of pride when you see the metrics go in the right way. The feedback that I've seen for our clients that do this really well is where the business comes back and says, "Oh, my God. The responsiveness is incredible. Even if I'm not getting the massive stuff that I used to get once every two years, I'm seeing movement on a regular basis, and I love it." And lot of clients that we talk to are really fired up about that.

What we hear from our clients is that things are hyper-competitive and that technology, in particular software and applications, is a huge competitive advantage. So, our ability to move fast and beat the competitors to the punch with capability is enormously important.

More of a scorecard

Hipps: We configured this model trying deliberately not to be ultra-prescriptive. There are many heavy-duty models that do exist, and people can dig into those to their heart’s content. This is as much a maturity scorecard as anything.

One of the examples that you might see or one of the ways you might begin to engage yourself is something like defect leakage. Defect leakage refers to the number of defects that you discover in live in the application that you could have caught earlier.

We have some figures that show that the average is in the neighborhood of 40 percent of application defects that leak into production and are discovered in live. They could have been caught earlier. It may be little higher than 40 percent, which is a fairly shocking number.

But on the high end, the world-class customers we worked with, see less than 5 percent of defects working their way into production. So right off the bat there, you're talking an 80 percent-plus drop in the number of defects that you're experiencing in a live environment, with all the attendant cost savings, brand improvement, and good will in the business that you would expect.

That’s one example of the kind of thing that you can look at, tease out, and begin to get a sense of where might I sit maturity wise. From that, you can potentially take a cue as to where is it that I want to start, where is it that I want to make the biggest investment, as I look to make myself more mature.

There are hosts of sophisticated KPIs we can design for ourselves, but one of the key ones was, "I want to know what the business thinks of us, and whether we are trending in the right direction."

Speaking from the application domain, our friends in the agile communities have been the leading champions of this notion. Our default stand [as development teams] was one of being change-averse.

By that, I mean that there was this whole contractual relationship with business. You tell us what you need, and we're going to document it as best as we can, down to having all the semicolons in the right place.

"We're going to break out the quill pens and ink our signatures. Forever shall it be, and if you change anything here, we're going to hit you with the request for change, and it will go through a cycle of six weeks and maybe we'll agree to it," etc., etc. The longest time that was the mindset. You can look at that and say it's awful, but when I had far fewer applications, and they took far longer to build, it was just the way of the world.

The recognition today for all of the reasons we've talked about in this podcast and others, our applications are everywhere. They're always on. There is nothing I can do in a business that isn't going to touch the application. It fundamentally means, we need to sweep from the table, that notion of being change-averse. Instead, we need to be in a position of embracing change. We do need to be change-ready.

The leading traits

As Mark said, we need to be architected and engineered, from our people process technology perspective, to put ourselves in a position to be that way. In the book, we talk a bit about some of the principles we think come into play for change ready organizations. But, that's why it is one of the leading traits, the leading principles, in world-class organizations.

This could be a mantra of sorts: Think big, start small, scale quickly. The basic idea of think big is the idea that you want to spend some time making sure that you’ve all got a shared vision of where you want to be, and we talk a bit about whether that was a maturity model -- these principles of predictability and repeatability, etc.

Hopefully we've set at least some suggested guidelines for constructing what your end state might look like. But, this point about thinking big is that, as we all know, certainly in IT but probably anywhere, it's every easy to fall into a state of analysis paralysis. We've got to figure out exactly the right metrics to decide exactly what we're going to be. We've got to figure out precisely what our time-line is.

We sort of can borrow from our friends in agile, who have said that you've got to understand the perimeter of what it is you want to accomplish, but still it's bound to change. Those perimeters are bound to shift. You're bound to discover things about yourselves, your organizations, what's feasible, and what's not in the process of actually trying to get there.

It's important to set yourself an objective and make sure it's a shared objective. It's just as critical to get going to not fall into a trap of endless planning and reconsideration of plans.

So, it's important to set yourself an objective and make sure it's a shared objective. It's just as critical to get going to not fall into a trap of endless planning and reconsideration of plans.

If, you then pluck the low-hanging fruit, the easy things we could do starting this week, starting tomorrow, to advance us at least generally toward these ends, this end objective, that's great. Then, it becomes a matter of just continuing to move, scale, and adapt.

Somewhere, we make the point that, as an application team, certainly at least as an application member, I cared a lot more about measurable progress, seeing things actually advancing and getting better. Then, I cared less about how shiningly brilliant the end-state was going to be or exactly how we were going to get there.

Unconscious sabotage

Sarbiewski: I spent a number of years in a former life doing process change for companies. There were some trade secretes in the firm I worked with. They recognized some unchanging facts that that people can consciously or unconsciously sabotage the greatest plans, any process you want, or any kind of a change.

You have to start with people. It does involve all the people-process-technology in that order, but it's the people considerations. Do we have that shared vision? Who are the skeptics? Where do we think this could go wrong? Are we committed to getting there?

There were some questions we’d as we were embarking on making this change. First of all we said, what project or what pilot -- if we did these changes on it -- would people in the organization say, "If it works for that project, it will work for us as an organization."

So, find that visible pilot project, not one that’s an exception. Don’t find one where there are four developers and they are in the same room. If you try something new, people can say, "Well, of course, it worked for that, but that’s so atypical." So, find that project.

Beyond that, find the champion who is really respected in the organization, but skeptical of the change. We would go looking for one or two people who were open-minded enough to really give it a go, but maybe steeped in how we’ve done it, and have been very successful in how we’ve done it. Then, people can say, "That’s the kind of project we do, so you need to be able to make it work there. If Joe or Mary or whoever it is, if they buy into and it works for them, I believe."

The one other thing I’d say is start thinking about those types of metrics, those cross-silo and lifecycle-oriented goals and metrics.

Maybe, let's reward jointly the operations and the dev teams, if they’ve met those customer satisfaction goals, those service level agreements (SLAs), and those low counts of defects in production. You start to create a different dynamic, when you think more about lifecycle goals and cross-team goals.

Hipps: The spirit of this book, and probably the spirit of a lot of these kinds of books, ... If I have one hope, it’s that we haven’t been so pie-in-the-sky in our thinking that somebody reads this and says, "Yeah, nice idea, but it will never happen here."

So, that would be my hope -- somebody takes one single way that’s implementable in the near-term within their organization.

Sarbiewski: What I’m hoping is that in these hundred or so odd pages that executives in these enterprises that we're talking to have that opportunity to take just a couple hours and have somebody give them a chance to think about how important software is, and what the true life of an application is.

Once you start to go down that path and you start to say, wait a minute, 10, 15 years of evolving this capability, what does that mean? When things are live and I’ve got hot request from the business to make a change, what needs to happen? How much money will I spend on that?

The one "aha" moment is seeing that the 12 to 15 years matter, when I’m delivering value to the business and innovating for the business. In order to be successful during those 10 to 15 years, I will make different decisions when I build this thing. I will focus on a process.

I will build the automation to a different level, because I’ve stopped thinking that my job is done when I go live. If that’s truly the job, you’ll make a lot of shortcut decisions to get to go live. But, if you think bigger, you think about the full life of an application and what it delivers to the business.

All of a sudden, it makes a whole lot more sense to do things a bit differently, to set myself up for 10 years or 15 years of success with the business, as opposed to a moment when I can say, "Yup, I achieved a milestone."

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the third in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• New Book Explores Automating the Managed Application Lifecycle to Accelerate Delivery of Business Applications

• Automating the managed application lifecycle helps Delta Airlines deliver better business results
  
  
• Dave Shirk on how HP's Instant-On Enterprise takes aim at new demands on businesses, governments
  
  
• HP Shows Benefits from Successful Application Consolidation With Own Massive Global Supply Chain Project