Listen to this articleDear Friends of Kovair:
Greetings again after my communication with all of you in the January Newsletter! We held a very successful webinar in January for the Agile Development methodology using the Kovair solution and the two presenters for the first time were from two continents outside the US – Asia and Australia. As always, all our webinars are recorded and available on our website www.kovair.com
This month, our participation in two events – The STeP-IN SUMMIT 2011 in Bangalore for Software Testing and the Pink Elephant event in Las Vegas for IT Service Management – ITSM Solutions is keeping us occupied.
This newsletter contains a wonderful write-up by one of our Sales and Business Directors, Mike Kalthoff, about the current management dilemma in having clear visibility in an increasingly complex software development environment with multiple tools and multiple locations and how the Kovair Omnibus Integration Solution can facilitate overcoming many such issues. Please take the time to read it.
And last but not the least, our March 2 Webinar will focus on the Importance of Process in an IT Service Management Solution. We are bringing, for the first time, Josephine Smith, an executive from our customer – Northrop Grumman who is well experienced in setting up processes for the entire Help Desk or Service Management environment at a large corporation.
Happy reading!
Sincerely,
Bipin Shah
CEO and Chairman
Delivering Enterprise Visibility and Control Across All Development Tools and Platforms
Software development today has grown in complexity, with an influx of outsourced development resources, multiple locations, tighter deadlines and a tremendous need for tight coordination between disparate groups. Add to this, management´s pressures to deliver high quality projects on time and under budget. The stakes are higher than ever before.
The more you grow your IT department, the more software development tools are introduced adding productivity to be sure, but also adding complexity to the mix. Most companies have a mix of old tools and new tools. Some are centrally located and some are spread out to multiple continents. This disconnected environment has resulted in islands of development databases, causing delayed projects and frustrated management.
Some companies attack this problem by attempting to write their own tool-database-to-tool-database integrations. These are fragile- they breakdown whenever new releases are issued, and their upkeep tends to be the low project on the totem pole due to higher priority tasks. Some tool vendors have developed their own integration or two. These also tend to be fragile and frequently incomplete.
What is needed is a robust, universal plug-and-play integration platform that can fully integrate nearly every development tool ever made on a local or global scale. No more hand export/import work, no more separate reports, and no more breaks in traceability between tools.
Introducing the Kovair Omnibus Tool Integration Platform: Omnibus is a powerful and easy to install middleware solution that handles the simplest integration problems and the most complex ones without asking IT to write a single line of code. Omnibus is built as an integration hub and works with individual tool adapters that simply make each tool´s database available to the Omnibus engine.
Each adapter uses Web Services to make all data communications seamless, no matter where in the world they are located. This unique architecture allows for all of the integration logic and controls to be located in the hub, giving the user administrator WYSIWYG access to all integration points. From field matching to event triggers to traceability flows to business process logic, it´s all there.
Each installation of the Kovair Omnibus also comes with a standard configuration for each tool to be integrated, so the integrations for requirements, test cases, code files, project files and documents are ready to go. And given the ease of administration, configuration changes can be made on the fly, again, without writing a single line of code.
So what does this great platform mean to management? Plenty. First, Omnibus has the ability to run multi-tool reports to monitor project health, defect management, on-time delivery and resource allocation. Omnibus also has customizable dashboards for managers to view colorful charts and lists to stay on top of critical projects. Is there a bar or pie section out of the norm? No problem. Just click on it to drill down to the detail. In seconds you have an answer that was impossible to find before Omnibus. The result? Projects are on-time, under budget and built with a higher level of quality than ever before.
Today´s development environment is becoming more complex. Kovair´s Omnibus is the answer.
Upcoming Webinar: Importance of Process in IT Service Management-ITSM
The success of IT operations depends on well-defined processes and enforcing them consistently. However, enforcing an IT process manually is tedious and prone to errors. Well-defined and optimally implemented processes help organizations achieve Continual Service Improvements-CSI for various IT service areas such as Service Requests, Incidents, Problems and Change Management.
Learn from Josephine Smith of Northrop Grumman how she and her team implemented ITSM processes at Northrop.
Sky Basu, CTO of Kovair, will discuss the success criteria of ITSM processes implemented using Kovair´s industry leading visual process engine, the Omniprocess as an example.
Presenters:
Sky Basu – CTO & Vice President, Kovair Software, Milpitas, California
Josephine Smith – Northrop Grumman Corporation
