Listen to this articleEarly in April, we took a Spring break with the family as I had not taken a break in quite some time. It was nice to get away to the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park and California’s Death Valley – some would wonder why there? In the midst of all the enjoyment of still a bit chilly weather at the elevation of the Grand Canyon, we hiked down the Grand Canyon about half way down and back for the first time! The weather was beautiful otherwise and the colors at all three locations in their own way were outstanding!
The Zion National Park where you actually are driving and walking at the bottom of the canyon is not as talked about as some of the other attractions. A comparison with the Yosemite Valley would be that Zion has much more colorful sand stones carved by nature when viewed from the valley compared to Yosemite’s granite like grey rocks.
Death Valley was wonderful at this time of the year while it could be unbearable in the mid summer with its over 110 F temperatures (43.3 Celsius). One can marvel at all the earth tones you see on the layers of the hills and mountains there without a tree growing anywhere. The beauty of the spring flowers- both the yellow dandelions and some purple flowers – I do not know the variety – was making the vast fields very pleasant to drive by. Death Valley is also known for its dry and salty vast lake bed (the lake existed over 8,000 years ago) that has an area that is 180ft (55 meters) below the sea level.
A good break and a great enjoyment of nature’s pleasures and America’s National Park Treasures and now it’s time to get back to serious work at Kovair!
So, what’s new at Kovair? Customer activity is definitely up and in that sense the economic spring is continuing to boom further. More activity, more leads and more demos but the sales cycle times are still not getting any shorter it seems. Since my last blog post in mid-March, we have published two excellent papers on the entire concept of Integrated ALM where Kovair believes that true ALM cannot be achieved with all the intended outcome without the tools all coming together in a single data repository for good traceability and management reporting and decision making. The two papers, published by our CTO and VP Engineering respectively are “3 Approaches to Achieving Integrated ALM – a Case for ALM Middleware” and “Ten Benefits of Integrated ALM”. Please download these by clicking here or going to our website www.kovair.com and going to the download section to retrieve them for your reading or future use.
Interest in SaaS (Software as a Service) appears to be growing. Two out of our three recent customers have chosen SaaS for their delivery model. We are happy to serve customers with both the on-premise or SaaS deployments depending on their preferences without pushing them in either direction. Kovair is one of the few vendors to have On-Premise and SaaS delivery models both for ALM and ITSM solutions.
On our new products and product enhancement fronts, lot of work is going on in the following areas. Continuation of the work to build several integration adapters for our Omnibus Enterprise Service Bus with other ALM vendor tools that we are carrying out at a good pace – about 6 tools every quarter!
One of the major attractive features of our ALM Project Management solution is the imminent release (in pre-release testing) of a “What If Analysis” and “Resource Management” that will allow Project Managers to better estimate Project Deliverables and dates with this capability. Please read our April 2010 Newsletter for some more details for these and other product enhancements written by our VP of Engineering without the typical marketing spins!!
Let me leave it here for now with best wishes to all of you for good business growth and good fortunes!
