Listen to this articleDear Readers:
Greetings from Melbourne as I am here on a business trip “Down Under” exploring further partnerships in Australia which seems to be doing better economically through the last economic cycle compared to many other parts of the world!
Our CTO Sky Basu wrote about DevOps in this newsletter in March 2011 and indicated that DevOps is something that is being talked about and thought about more and more and how Kovair is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between ALM and ITSM. We had a discussion with one of the Gartner Analysts on this topic recently and were convinced based on that discussion that what we are offering in Kovair for solutions both in ALM and ITSM is uniquely positioning us in this space. The reason I write about this here is that more recently, we have had a few major potential customers ask us to show them demos – both for ALM and then for ITSM or vice versa. They see the benefits of dual solutions under a single data repository and are taking this thinking further by actually looking at such a possibility in implementing it today rather than in the future! I wanted to leave you with this thought as more and more of you are thinking of consolidating tools rather than expanding them. Kovair is in a unique position to help you in this consolidation that results in considerable cost reduction, integration of tools and functions and above all an excellent reporting capability resulting from these actions that aligns IT to the business and customer issues very effectively and provides management the decision making data it needs.
Elsewhere in this newsletter, you will read about the new Document Management capabilities we have added to the Kovair ALM and one of the recent customer successes in the integration of four different ALM tools around the Kovair Omnibus Middleware.
Sincerely,
Bipin A. Shah
CEO & Chairman
Kovair Adds Document Management Capabilities to ALM and ITSM Products
Kovair introduces new Document Management features to its portfolio of products. This integrated web-based document management system allows users to upload documents in a centralized location, with support for hierarchical multi-level folder organization, customized access settings for folders and documents, built-in version control and flexible review and approval workflows. Documents can be shared online by all stakeholders from everywhere in the world. Both in ALM and ITSM, lot of documents are produced during the entire lifecycle – these documents need to be efficiently managed, versioned and associated with artifacts (Requirements, Test Cases, Design items and Incidents) to provide the complete picture to users. Kovair Document Management provides the full set of functionalities needed to support an enterprise-level document repository as noted below.
- Documents can be uploaded and downloaded online from anywhere in the world
- Documents can be organized in nested Folder Hierarchy through easy drag-drop interface
- Folder-based multi-level access permissions for documents
- Categorize documents by types and classifications
- Search, sort and filter documents on meta-data and tags
- Document revisions with complete change history and audit trail
- Trace documents from ALM/ITSM artifacts (Requirements, Design Items, Tests, Bugs and Incidents)
- Visual drag-drop workflows for review and approval of documents
- Define and query custom fields for documents
- Submit multiple documents at one time
- Track document modifications with notifications
- Externally embeddable links for documents
- Full-text search
- Grouping documents like in binders
- Email documents
These capabilities are being released as part of the current Kovair Release 6.0 and upgrades will be available for all current users that are part of the Kovair Annual Maintenance Agreements.
Customer Success Story- Omnibus Middleware Integrations: A Successful POC at a Large Financial Institution
Recently, Kovair successfully completed a POC at a major financial institution that wanted to determine whether Kovair ALM Integration of multiple tools around its Omnibus Middleware works as “advertised”.
The following describes the pain point that was addressed by Kovair.
This company had an immediate need to integrate the data to and from for the following tools: CA Clarity, Rational ClearQuest, HP Quality Center and Microsoft TFS. This data includes the following: Software requirements, test cases linked to these requirements, source code files to track defects, and project management objects. Ideally, this data needs to seamlessly and quickly flow from one tool to another without manual intervention. However, at this company, in most cases, this data must be manually re-keyed or manually copied and pasted from one tool to another. This causes many developers, analysts, and managers, to use multiple development tools each in order to manage these manual data transfers, causing not only increases in the software licensing, support and maintenance costs but also increasing the work effort to manage this data and increasing the likelihood of keying errors. Without a fully integrated development environment, management lacks enterprise reporting capability as well as visibility into the development process. All of these added challenges increase the business risk to the company when responding to government regulatory compliance, reducing product and service quality to customers and decreasing the productivity of those having to deal with these developer tools.
Over a two-month evaluation period, Kovair was able to demonstrate, with an onsite installation at the company of its Omnibus and all the adapters for the multi-vendor tools that were involved, that this total integration can be achieved and run successfully as “advertised” by Kovair for its Omnibus Integration capabilities. For more details, contact Sales@Kovair.com
Kovair Whitepaper-A Case for ALM Middleware- Featured in SD Times
One of the most desirable aspects of the software development process for the last decade has been the evolution of Integrated Application Lifecycle Management; it’s also known as end-to-end ALM. Fulfilling the promise of true ALM integration has been patchy at best. However, in the last two years, things are changing – and the Kovair whitepaper titled “A Case for ALM Middleware” tells you all about one solution.
Kovair makes an ALM middleware technology called Omnibus Enterprise Service Bus. Register here for this technical paper to see how Omnibus works with all of your software development tools – from all of your favorite vendors – and delivers on the promise of end-to-end middleware today!
Upcoming Webinar: HP Quality Center and QTP Users: Integrate with multi-vendor tools for seamless ALM/SDLC Traceability, Analytics & Project Management, June 8 & 9, 2011
Among Development teams, HP Quality Center (QC) is a popular test management tool. With built-in integration with Quick Test Pro (QTP) it can manage and execute both manual and automated testing. QC’s support for Requirements and Defects management provides its users a single-point solution for managing Requirements to Test cases and Test cases to Defects Traceability. However, many groups use other development tools for various critical functions like Requisite Pro for requirements management, Jira for defect tracking, Eclipse for coding, ANT for build and Perforce for configuration management.
In this webinar, how Kovair’s Omnibus Integration Middleware integrates all these tools seamlessly will be presented and demonstrated with live data. The attendees will see from the vantage point of each tool user, how an integrated ALM2.0 can be achieved with minimum overhead. In addition, benefits at various levels of development management will be presented for such an integrated ecosystem of multi-vendor tools. Several important reports and dashboards will be shared.
Presenters:
Atanu Majumdar – VP Engineering, Kovair Software
Sky Basu – CTO & Vice-President, Kovair Software
