Aldon, a leading provider of process-driven Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Solutions, this month announced the result of a global customer survey revealing leading organizations are using Aldon ALM to help manage business-critical IT initiatives ranging from Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to compliance to outsourcing, in an effort to bring processes to the development lifecycle. The survey was conducted to help better understand companies' top priorities for using ALM solutions and the market forces driving its adoption.?
The survey, which was completed by more than 400 Aldon customers in August and September of 2007, revealed that 62 per cent of respondents are currently developing web services or implementing SOA, and more than a third are using Aldon ALM to manage the development. The results demonstrate the surge in Web 2.0 development taking place in leading IT organizations worldwide. Unitrin Specialty, a leading auto insurance provider, is a key Aldon customer benefiting from Aldon ALM to manage its SOA development looking to extend web services out to agents and brokers.
The survey also showed that nearly 50 per cent of the respondents are outsourcing application development or managing geographically distributed teams. One leading financial services customer is running a major network of geographically distributed IT teams across four countries, where Aldon is currently accessed by more than 100 users. With Aldon, the company gains standardized IT processes across the organization so issues are tracked from the time they are raised to resolution and managers can identify potential trouble spots in advance and act accordingly.
The importance of compliance issues is also highlighted by the results, with over 57 per cent of respondents using Aldon’s solution to address regulatory issues and compliance. Of these, the majority – 67 per cent - are using it for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Other compliance initiatives mentioned include PCI, ITIL, HIPAA, Basel II and The Patriot Act. Masterbrand Cabinets, Inc. is an ideal example of compliance done right by implementing Aldon ALM.
“Rapid change and fierce competition are forcing today’s businesses to be more responsive to market pressures than ever before,” said Matt Scholl, president and chief operating officer at Aldon. “With IT running many of the core processes that businesses rely on for daily operations, Aldon’s goal is to provide our customers with process-driven solutions that help them meet business requirements and build competitive advantage.”
Analysts widely accept that the adoption of effective ALM solutions enables IT organizations to manage increasingly complex software development that results from offshoring, outsourcing, distributed development, compliance, and emerging SOA initiatives.
In Gartner’s February 2007 report titled Key Issues for AD Tools: Life Cycle Management Tools, VP and senior research analyst Jim Duggan states, “Users of IT are looking to ‘manage IT like a business,’ with improved auditability, manageability and predictability. Duggan emphasizes that “Lifecycle management solutions seek to deliver software and applications within budget and on schedule. Distributed development teams, shorter schedules and more complex architectures will require increased capabilities for planning and control throughout software and application lifecycles.”