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Borland Customer Survey Examines the Current State of the Application Lifecycle Management Market

Survey results released today by Borland Software Corporation (www.borland.com), a global leader in open application lifecycle management (ALM), show that the majority of organizations are delivering software in extremely heterogeneous environments, with nearly 90 percent relying on multiple ALM tools from several different vendors to get the job done. The survey also explored organizations' top software delivery priorities and challenges and looked at the top ALM-related initiatives Borland customers plan to tackle in the coming year.

According to the survey, which polled more than 300 Borland customers in May and June 2007, 69 percent of respondents support two or more development platforms, with 42 percent deploying to both Java and .NET environments. The survey also revealed that half of respondents are using four or more ALM tools, and that 33 percent of them have tools from more than three different vendors. In addition, 44 percent of respondents reported that they use two or more software development processes, with agile methodologies and custom processes receiving the highest percentages of votes.

"The survey results offer further evidence that our Open ALM strategy is aligned with customer needs," said Marc Brown, vice president of product marketing at Borland. "Borland understands that every enterprise is different - organizations are leveraging a unique, and sometimes challenging, combination of runtime platforms, multi-vendor tools and development processes - this isn't going to change, and our Open ALM approach supports these realities by providing solutions that allow teams to best leverage their existing assets to succeed at software delivery."

Survey responses also demonstrated that organizations are challenged to effectively manage and coordinate the end-to-end process of software delivery to achieve the full potential of ALM. More than half of respondents identified one of several "connection-related" issues - disconnected processes, lack of visibility and traceability across the lifecycle, lack of metrics, poor interoperability between tools, functional silos - as the biggest software delivery challenge or deficiency their IT organization needs to overcome.

"If I look at our software delivery team today, we have the tools and processes in place to support the various roles and functions - we've invested a great deal," said George Cerny, quality assurance manager at SmartSignal. "For us, the next step really is to find a way for these tools to 'talk' to each other so that we can begin to have a single platform that joins team members, manages critical assets and activities, and provides a way to coordinate, measure and manage all the phases as a whole. The benefits in terms of development efficiency and application quality would be incredible."

Business and IT alignment remains elusive The survey also asked respondents what their top priority was when delivering software, 58 percent selected "meeting the needs of the business/customer." However, for 44 percent of those surveyed, mastering the critical ALM process that is most directly linked to achieving this goal - effectively defining and managing requirements - is the biggest challenge or deficiency their IT organization needs to overcome to achieve more predictable software delivery. Also of note, almost a quarter of the respondents ranked "delivering high quality software" as their top priority, making it the second most common response.

Lastly, the survey revealed that nearly half of respondents are planning to implement process improvement initiatives as their biggest ALM-related projects for the coming year. Integrating tools, which received 21 percent of the vote, was the second most common ALM initiative. Another 17 percent of those surveyed indicated they are planning to implement measurement initiatives designed to improve their ability to assess project status, risk and quality.

"'You can't improve what you can't measure' is a trite - but true - adage," continued Brown. "The feedback we've heard from so many of our customers is that they are struggling to find a way to collect the disparate project data from their various lifecycle tools required to manage, measure and improve their delivery process."


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