From the Desk of the CEO – January 2010

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Dear Kovair Customers and Friends,

Welcome to the first newsletter of the year and let me wish you and your businesses a very successful year in an environment of many signs of an improving global economy. Let us hope that the year bodes well for all of us!

As I said in my December 2009 comments, Kovair had a good year and we hope to build on it further in 2010. We have been assessing our product offerings and strengths and are going to focus on three areas for serving our customers going forward.

First and foremost, our focus is going to be on a truly integrated Application Lifecycle Management or ALM SOLUTIONS where Kovair is a leader in the integration of best-of-breed tools from multiple vendors including our own, with our very unique Omnibus Enterprise Service Bus offering. We have gained considerable experience in this area and should be able to add very high value by synchronizing your product development environment of tool silos with total visibility, excellent management reporting and global collaborative development capability without asking you to replace your current tools!

The second area of our focus is IT Service Management or ITSM SOLUTIONS where our combined capabilities to configure complex IT Service processes and integrate multiple tools whether they are for Help Desk or Change Management can offer better solutions than many such legacy Tools in the market. We have built that credibility with several customers in this domain during 2009. We are taking this capability to the International IT Service Management show organized by Pink Elephant during the week of February 21st at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. I hope that many of you are able to visit the show and visit our booth (#514) to learn more about our ITSM offerings.

The third initiative is what truly exists inherently in Kovair due to its architectural make up and that is to use Kovair as Applications Development Platform either on the Cloud or at corporate data centers commonly referred to as Platform as a Service or PaaS. These apps can be developed with mouse click configurations and without requiring any software programming knowledge. Gartner in a recent report describes them as “Citizen Developers” – the business users developing apps themselves. Above all, we offer all our capabilities both as on premise licenses as well as Software as a Service – SaaS.

I will spare you the product details in these comments but depending on where we can be of most help to you in resolving your pain points in managing product requirements, reducing your development costs by improving processes and visibility, improving management visibility through the creation of integrated development infrastructure, improving collaborative development or service deliveries over the web, and improving timely product deliveries to your end customers, Kovair is a compelling stop for you to visit and assess to convince yourselves to consider its usage. We welcome this scrutiny and will be more than happy to work with you to collectively find solutions that you are seeking.

All the best,

Bipin Shah
CEO & Chairman
www.Kovair.com
www.www.kovair.com/blog
CEO & Chairman
Kovair Software

How Are You Doing, Requirements Management?

By: Sky Basu, Kovair CTO

When one outgrows the world’s most popular Requirements Management tool Microsoft Word, and wishes to implement a Requirements Management discipline, one starts looking for a specialized Requirements Management tool. The first tool one tries is the Bug tracking or Issue management tool that is being used in the organization. Though it is a natural impulse to take this step, the outcome is not always a happy one. For someone who just wants a place to dump a list of items called Requirements, a bug tracking tool possibly serves that purpose. But Requirements Management is much more than that and even the most sophisticated Issues Management software does not have the right set of functionality to handle the needs of Requirements Management.

When one starts looking for a commercial Requirements Management software, one finds a wide range of tools from various vendors. This includes well-known expensive tools with 90’s technology from industry behemoths to the feature light cool Web 2.0 styled interface from young start-ups. It’s not surprising that someone new to Requirements Management gets quite confused in the din of noise from all these vendors.

Kovair has prepared a list of 65 questions one should ask to the Requirements Management tool vendors. This list is a compilation of various needs from a number of customers looking for Requirements Management tool. Due to the wide variety of customers these questions cover a large area of needs. For a single customer all of these may or may not be relevant today, but this list gives a good idea about all the features a good Requirements Management tool should have for today’s and tomorrow’s needs.

Click to download the whitepaper “65 Questions for a Requirements Management Tool.”

  • Requirement Definition
  • Viewing and Hierarchy of Requirements
  • Traceability and Versioning
  • Effort Estimating
  • Reporting
  • Release Associated Requirements

One can use Kovair’s ALM solution either on-premise or Software as a Service (SaaS). Kovair’s ALM solution includes Requirements Management, Test Management, Issues Management, Risk Management and Release Management.

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Kovair Software is a Silicon Valley software products company specializing in the domain of Software Product Development tools and solutions and supports global software development and management through Value Stream Management Platforms – VSMP. Kovair’s focus on integrating third-party best-of-breed ALM and various other tools such as PLM, PPM, ERP, CAD, CRM, ITSM, Test Management and other Applications enables the creation of products in a synchronized tools environment through its Omnibus Integration Platform. Now with its recent addition of DevOps and DevSecOps capabilities, it has a full offering of product development tools in multiple domains enabling high quality product development and digital transformation for corporations. Kovair’s flagship products Omnibus Integration Platform, Kovair DevOps and DevSecOps, Kovair ALM, PPM and QuickSync, are highly preferred solutions for some of the major corporations globally.