From the Desk of the CEO – January 2011

Dear Friends of Kovair:

Happy New Year and our best wishes to you for your personal and business success during 2011.There are several things we want to share with you in this newsletter.

First and foremost is the release of our JIRA adapter for integration with the very widely used JIRA Issues Management tool from Atlasian. Details are provided below. Two other integration adapters that have been released recently are for the Clarity PPM from CA and Clearquest from Rational.

During December and early January two major integration pilots have been in progress at two major companies that utilize Kovair Omnibus integration adapters for Clarity, Clearquest, HPQC, JIRA, Requisite Pro and SVN, which corroborates our belief that the Kovair Omnibus Integration Middleware is the way to easily create an Integrated ALM Ecosystem with the best –of- breed tools.

As we kick off our webinar series for the year, I am happy to inform you that our first webinar this year is focused on Agile ALM for the adoption of Agile in multi- location global development and how the Kovair ALM can be deployed very effectively for this type of development challenge – multi sites, multi teams and multi projects! Please sign up for the webinar with the details provided in the newsletter for registration.

Kovair is participating as a sponsor in two major events in February – one at the 15th International Pink Elephant Show for IT Service Management(ITSM), Feb 20-23, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, where our CTO Sky Basu is participating in the panel “Five Tips for Successful Tool Implementation”. Please take some time to view a demo of our ITILv3 -compliant ITSM Solution at the Kovair booth 304

The second is in Bangalore called the SteP-IN Summit 2011 focused on Testing and Quality, Feb 17-18. You will be able to see our Requirements, Test and Test Management capabilities for the ALM at the Kovair booth. You may also visit our website at www.kovair.com and get the details.

I am also happy to inform you that we have more than doubled our facility size for product development, test and support operations in India and are ready to face the expansion challenges in 2011. Our employees are very thrilled to move into this brand new state- of- the art facility in the key IT hub of Kolkata in the Salt Lake Sector V area.

Sincerely,
Bipin A. Shah
CEO & Chairman

JIRA Adapter for Kovair Omnibus Integration Framework Released

JIRA is a popular tool for Issue tracking. Kovair just released a JIRA adapter that will allow automatic bi-directional synchronization of work items between JIRA and other on-premise or SAAS based Development or IT tools including Kovair ALM and ITSM. This adapter is using Kovair Omnibus Integration Framework to connect JIRA to all the tools already hooked to Omnibus like IBM RequisitePro, HP Quality Center, Microsoft TFS, Subversion and CA Clarity. Developers can continue their implementation work in JIRA while Requirements, Features and Defects may be pushed into JIRA from the tools used by other stakeholders. The changes and status updates in JIRA can be published to other tools. Code files that are worked on in SCM tools like Subversion, Perforce, ClearCase and TFS to implement the features or to resolve the issues in JIRA can be traced through this adapter. This automated integration process will allow development team using JIRA to be always in sync with other teams. This will save substantial efforts which are otherwise devoted to manual and redundant synchronization jobs.

Unlike other point-to-point connectors out in the market, JIRA adapter for Kovair Omnibus Framework works with an Enterprise Service Bus architecture. In this architecture each tool is connected to the bus through a single adapter.

Kovair to Provide Asset Discovery & CMDB Solutions – partner with www.nsolutions.com

An enterprise owns various IT Assets known as Configuration Items (CIs). CIs include: Software (Enterprise, Desktop Tools), Hardware (Sever, Desktop, Notebooks), Network Equipment (Router, Switches), Telecom (EPBAX, Desktop phones, Mobile Phones, Fax) and other special purpose equipment Given the complexity of managing the multitude of such Assets, Asset/ CI Management plays a central role in IT Service Management , involving the critical importance of Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Kovair ITSM provides for CMDB implementation on a 100% browser interface. Kovair CMDB supports such proactive features as reminders about application license renewals, license management, and planned equipment maintenance.

One of the CMDB challenges is to create the Assets/ CI database in the first place and keeping it synchronized with the actual assets. Given this, Kovair has partnered with a Silicon Valley based company nSolutions for the discovery of various Assets in the network and for automatic synchronization of changes in the assets.

The benefits of integration of Kovair ITSM and nSolutions´ Nova are the following:

• With a tight integration between the two, discovery, updates and management of assets become streamlined and automatic.
• Many of the dependency relations between CIs can be automatically discovered by the discovery service. For example: which software is running on which server? Which OS is needed to run a particular application?
• Once the Assets are in Kovair through nSolutions´ integrated discovery service, users can manually create dependency relations between various CIs using the easy drag-and-drop interface.
• Kovair CMDB tightly integrates with other applications in Kovair´s ITSM such as Helpdesk/ Service Desk, Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, and Knowledgebase. As a result, linking an asset with a service request lets the IT service manager know which Assets are involved in the request.
• A change in one Asset can determine whether other Assets are impacted by that change based on the dependency relations.
• With various reports and dashboards, Kovair CMDB helps one keep all the information easily accessible for operational efficiency.

Please contact Kovair Sales for more information if you are interested in this solution – Sales@Kovair.com

Upcoming Webinar

“ALM – The Agile Way with Kovair”

This webinar will discuss and demonstrate the adoption of Agile methodology for ALM. Many ALM tools are constrained to one or possibly two development methodologies and/or frameworks. In the Agile implementation space, although the key concepts are somewhat consistent, the way they are implemented can vary. What is required is an ALM tool that allows for an Agile Team to manage a project or set of projects that can have:

• Agile Developers around the planet working across multiple projects
• Deliveries spread across multiple teams
• Agile Developers using various tools for managing, developing, testing and reporting across many projects that need to talk to each other and,
• Backlog shared across multiple projects requiring refactoring.

Add full traceability, advanced reporting across code, projects, backlogs, and alerts, and Kovair is a tool that can be easily configured to meet the needs of most Agile Teams and Projects.

Dr. Richard Satur – Director, Kovair Australasia
Soumanil Chowdhury – Manager, Sales Engineering, Kovair Software, India