Listen to this articleDear Reader:
By most counts, 2010 has been a good year for Kovair. I would like to highlight the significant developments while taking care that I do not bore you with my enthusiasm for Kovair!
At the outset, we decided to focus on Application Lifecycle Management-ALM, IT Service Management- ITSM and Omnibus Integration Middleware, and we can say that we maintained that focus and made progress in all three areas!
We kicked the year off with our ITSM SaaS announcement at the Pink Elephant Show in Las Vegas in February and continued to gain customers both in SaaS and in on -Premise offerings. By year-end we have three different configurations of the ITSM offerings for within Enterprises, Enterprises and Service Organizations that serve other vendor customers, and a third offering that includes the prior version with other service-providing vendors. All of these offerings are ITIL v3 compliant. Moreover, with our process engine capabilities, our customers are finding our solution to be of great value in configuring it to their specific needs as well as experiencing ease in meeting their customers’ multiple SLA needs and global time zones- based SLA computations that are all configurable. Besides, we have a complete solution that starts with Service Tickets and completes the full-Service Lifecycle through Change Management!
On the ALM front, we introduced our ALM Product in June that placed all of the functionalities of Requirements, Test, Issues, Risk, Release and Project Management in one offering with a single data repository at a very competitive price. We believe there is only one other such offering in the market from a large vendor but it is priced considerably higher than the ALM. So, any customer looking at combining Requirements, Test and Release in one offer cannot afford not to look at the ALM!
During the year, several product enhancements were made to the Kovair ALM offering that could also be carried through for other related applications. The major enhancements worth noting are the following:
- Resource Planning for Project Management, including What-If Analysis & Flexible Resource Allocation
- Folder Structure for Requirements Management, in addition to our List-Based Views
- Capture of Work Items directly from emails
- Multiple Calendars for ITSM SLA computations and commit dates
Omnibus Integration Middleware: Considerable market momentum was gained on this Integrated ALM Front with the introduction of 10 new integration adapters in 2010 and one of our customers scaling up to about 6,000 developers in an integrated development environment around 14 different tools!
Other activities for customers included publication of four highly popular white papers, as listed below:
- 65 Questions to Ask for a Requirements Management Tool
- 3 Approaches to Integrated ALM – A Case for Integration Middleware
- 10 Benefits of Integrated ALM
- Integrated Project Management by Kovair
We conducted six webinars in 2010 – the most in any year so far! All of them are available as recorded webinars from our website.
We will strive to serve all our current and new customers even better in 2011, and we ask for your honest and objective feedback in helping us improve our products and services.
With all the best wishes for a Happy Holiday Season and a Happy and Successful 2011.
Sincerely,
Bipin Shah
CEO & Chairman
New Product Features: Resource Capacity & Customer Demand Management
Large organizations, having hundreds of customer Requirements to implement or thousands of support tickets to resolve on a regular basis, often face the daunting challenge of finding out the right resources for the right job based on their skill-set and availability. Organizations inevitably struggle with tracking resources with their up-to-date capacity and workload and with assigning work based on their roles, availability, load and job priority. How do you ensure maximum capacity utilization of thousands of your organizational resources? How do you manage huge customer demands, such as Requirements’ implementation, Tickets’ resolution, Requests’ fulfillment using your resources efficiently, and delivering as per SLA?
Addressing these questions, Kovair has introduced new exciting features for managing resource capacity and customer demand:
- Resources are automatically assigned jobs on the basis of their roles, load, availability, job priority and SLA requirement.
- Roles can be defined as per your organization and project requirements, and people can play those roles based on their skill-set, productivity, experience and other factors.
- Calendars can be configured for the organization, time zones and individual resources. Holidays or time-offs can be setup.
- Job priorities can be automatically calculated on the basis of SLA and other customer attributes.
- Workflows can be setup to automate requirements’ implementation, tickets’ resolution and any other demand fulfillment. These automated workflows will generate tasks automatically and assign people as customer demand items move through the delivery lifecycle.
- Often organizations find it difficult to ascertain whether they will be able to deliver to a customer on time in the absence of a good up-to-date visibility in their resource situation, and they tend to make incorrect decisions even when they have resources who can work on the customer demand. Kovair feature ensures optimum utilization of resource capacity and saves a lot of money which is otherwise wasted because of inefficient and largely manual assignment practice for any large organization.
How do you get back to your customer with a delivery date for their requirements, change requests and support tickets? Kovair has brought in an intelligent and sophisticated Resource leveling algorithm. This new feature allows you to automatically find out the delivery estimate, based on your current resource availability and load. Furthermore, you can track these delivery schedules throughout the implementation lifecycle. Escalation actions can be triggered automatically for any deviation on the delivery schedule that is promised to customer. This automated process ensures on-time delivery with increased customer satisfaction.
Kovair has also come up with demand management features, which are as follows:
- You can setup different “What-If-Analysis” scenarios to meet customer demand in accord with your resource availability, time schedule and demand items.
- You can find out how many resources will need to be planned for implementing a set of customer demand items in a given timeframe.
- You can ascertain which set of demand items you will be able to deliver with your current resources in a given timeframe.
- You can figure out when you can deliver a given set of customer items with your resources, considering their existing workload and availability.
The above-mentioned features will help organizations to make better decisions and plan better for demand management.
Kovair Completes Two New Integrations? IBM Rational ClearQuest integration and CA Clarity in November 2010? JIRA to Follow
Kovair is pleased to announce the completion of these two integration adapters for the Kovair Omnibus Integration Middleware. With these two additions, Kovair’s portfolio of completed integrations with several third-party tools has now reached a total of 23 adapters, providing customers with a wide choice of off–the–shelf integrations in conjunction with our ALM and ITSM products for both the Applications Development and Service Management functions. The adapter for JIRA from Atlassian will be the next one to be completed in December 2010. For further information, please contact Sales@Kovair.com
Kovair Expanding Kolkata, India Development Facility
Kovair is planning to move to a new facility for its Kolkata area Salt Lake sector V Development and Support Office, which will allow it to double its personnel capacity from early January 2011. The State of the Art facility is under construction and is located in the most concentrated area for IT companies in what is known as Salt Lake Sector V area of Kolkata; this area has developed rapidly over the past few years and has the presence of companies like IBM, Wipro and Cognizant Technologies. Kovair plans to add personnel for multiple functions in 2011 at this new facility.
Upcoming Webinar
“Kovair Omnibus Integrations with Best of Breed Tools from all Major ALM Vendors – IBM, HP, Microsoft and CA”
Experience Integrated ALM with tools like RequisitePro, HP Quality Center, Clear Quest, Clearcase, Microsoft TFS, Visual Studio, Eclipse and Clarity that will take you on a fully integrated Software Development Life Cycle ? SDLC/ALM – from Requirements to Release and many important steps in between! Only Kovair Omnibus Middleware integrations can deliver on this value proposition today!
Please register now!
Presenters:
Atanu Majumdar, VP of Engineering, Kovair Software, Milpitas, California Sky Basu, CTO and President, Kovair Software, Milpitas, California
