HP Lifts Application Lifecycle Management into the Cloud

There’s no doubt that thanks to agile development methodologies IT organizations are churning out more code than ever. The problem they now face is figuring out how to keep up with all that code from a management perspective.

Most of the existing application lifecycle management (ALM) frameworks that IT organizations have in place were designed to support more traditional Waterfall approaches to application development, during which application code is released on average once or twice a year. Agile development often results in new code being shipped every month, and in some instances multiple times a week.

To help IT organizations make that transition, Hewlett-Packard today released software-as-a-service (SaaS) implementations of a new ALM platform alongside a set of tools for analyzing application performance.

HP is not the first vendor to make these kinds of tools available as a service. But as a major player in the ALM space, the release of these HP tools represents a significant shift in terms of how ALM is being delivered across the enterprise.

According to Subbu Iyer, vice president of products and strategy for applications automation and management in HP Software, HP Agile Manager provides end-to-end visibility across the ALM process for as little as $39 per user per month. Iyer says HP developed this offering with the specific aim of making it so accessible that no training is required to use it. HP Agile Manager supports multiple integrated development environments while also providing a series of analytics, planning and capacity management tools to help identify bottleneck issues across the development process.

HP Performance Anywhere, meanwhile, not only identifies the source of performance issues, but it includes collaboration tools that make it easier for IT operations staff to share information about those issues.

As adoption of agile development methodologies continues to grow, IT organizations are clearly being challenged to find new ways of managing application development. For the most part, trying to adopt existing Waterfall-based processes simply won’t work. What’s really required is a new way of thinking about managing application development projects that is as agile as the process itself.