Listen to this articleDear Friends of Kovair,
We are combining our February and March 2010 newsletters this time due to our inability to publish one in February. The blog in February did provide some updates on our events and participation in those events and if you did not get a chance to visit the blog last month, please take the time to do so by clicking on the URL www.kovair.com/blog. A major news item during the last two weeks is our participation at the Pink Elephant event in Las Vegas and announcing the SaaS/Cloud version of our IT Service Management solutions suite. About 170 companies visited the Kovair booth and looked at our offering and asked some very good questions. It was very well received. Please review our Press release for the event at Las Vegas. This newsletter contains an article on ITSM Show participation by our CTO Sky Basu.
We have been busy upgrading several aspects of the Kovair Global Lifecycle Product and have built several additional third party tool integration adapters over the last three months. These product enhancements and the new integration adapters are listed in the “What’s New for Kovair Products” summary prepared by our VP Engineering for this Newsletter.
In addition to these items of interest, challenge yourselves with the monthly quiz that compels some of you to open this newsletter!
With best wishes,
Sincerely,
Bipin Shah
CEO & Chairman
What’s New for Kovair Products?
Kovair is currently working on a number of exciting new features and enhancements listed below. This release will come out early part of April 2010.
Multiple Calendars
Provides the ability to define multiple calendars at the organization level to accommodate different time zones, shifts and customer locations around the world. This is important for any globally distributed Development or IT team.
High level Resource Planning
This feature helps to do visual drag-drop Release planning based on resources, deliverables and time constraints. What-if-analysis (WIA) supports creating multiple scenarios which allows the user to change different parameters for each Release and see how that affects the Start/ Finish dates, Resource loading and Requirements/Change Requests/Defects assignments. These WIA scenarios can be compared visually and planning decision can be made by committing the chosen scenario.
Enhanced Security
Features to define security policies for strong user password setup, password expiry at regular intervals and locking out users after a specified number of failed login attempts.
New Dashboard Gadgets – Service Catalog & Rich Text Type
This introduces two more widget types for Dashboard. Service Catalog gadget provides a centralized inventory of customer service offerings – specifically important for Helpdesk.
Capture Work items through direct email submission
This feature facilitates improved customer participation by capturing customer inputs/feedbacks as Requirements/Change Requests/Bugs through direct email submission.
New Integration Adapters
- Visual Studio Team System Plug-in
- Rational Software Architect/ Modeler Plug-in
- Rational Application Developer Plug-in
- Rational Functional Tester Plug-in
- JTest Plug-in
- Subversion Plug-in
- Omnibus Adapter for Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS)
- Omnibus Adapter for HP QuickTestPro (QTP)
Off-the-shelf Integration Packages
- Java Package for Application Development groups using Eclipse, JUnit, ANT, Subversion tools.
- Rational Package for Application Development groups using Rational tools like RequisitePro, Rational Software Architect/Modeler, Rational Application Developer, Rational Functional Tester, Rational Test Manager, ClearCase and ClearQuest tools.
- .NET Package for Application Development groups using Microsoft tools like Visual Studio Team System, Team Foundation Server, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Word, Excel and SharePoint.
Kovair makes its SaaS ITSM debut at the Pink Elephant Conference in Las Vegas… Kovair just wrapped up its participation at the three day 14th International ITSM 2010 conference at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas organized by Pink Elephant. Kovair took this opportunity to launch its ITSM SaaS solution. Kovair had a booth for meeting the customers and answering their question like ‘how are you different’ from all the other ITSM tool vendors showing off their tools?
As expected, the show was attended by the usual suspects offering the entire or partial stack of ITSM applications – Service Desk, incident management, Change Management, Problem and CMDB. With some new vendors offering Web based ITSM solutions, this field is getting pretty competitive and the customers are the winners for that. Kovair, rather than joining the fray with yet another solution with Service Desk, Incidents, Change and Problem management applications, focuses on two problems the IT service community is facing which most other tools are not addressing. Don’t get us wrong; Kovair has a very powerful solution including all the above applications which can serve IT organizations of various sizes. But Kovair can provide certain solutions which other tool vendors have not even started working on!
The first problem Kovair addresses is the whole concept of process design, implementation, automation, enforcement and maintenance without the heavy duty overhead of ‘code-test-deploy’ cycle. Kovair’s graphic process designer can be used to create multiple processes for each application just by drag-and-drop mouse clicks without writing a single line of code. Now think, how that can change the relation between IT and the business customers. It is no longer necessary for Business users to explain to IT how the process works verbally (or in rare cases in a complete written document). They can just sit down together (may be even over the Internet) and design the process visually and collaboratively. Nothing is lost in translation. Moreover, once the process is in production, just making small changes need not involve the developer to change the code, test and then deploy, which can take days or even weeks. Making changes in Kovair is easy and quick as it is done visually. The changes can be achieved in hours which typically can take days with other tools.
The second problem Kovair is addressing is an even bigger one – integration of various ITSM applications. It is not unusual to find in an organization various functions of ITSM being done by various tools from disparate vendors. Kovair’s Omnibus integration technology offers an ITSM middleware to integrate various tools using a SOA based Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Just think of a scenario where a service request starts in one tool, triggers an incident in the second tool and triggers a change request in the third tool and all driven by a single process designed and implemented using a visual process designer without writing a single line of code. Yes, Kovair can do this today with ease. Kovair’s Omnibus integration technology is the only ITSM middleware today delivering the scenarios similar to the one described above in a tight link with Kovair’s process technology –the Omniprocess.
But Kovair is not just Omnibus and Omniprocess. Most of the companies looking for an integrated ITSM solution will find Service Desk, Incidents, Change, Problem, CMDB management in a single solution delivered in a web architected 100% browser based application for on-premise and SaaS deployment.
Read more about Kovair’s ITSM solution here and play with a fully functional sandbox here.
