HP announced two new software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that the company says are intended to speed application delivery and improve visibility, collaboration and agility across often siloed or geographically dispersed application development and operations teams.
HP Agile Manager accelerates application time to market with an intuitive, web-based experience that offers visibility for planning, executing and tracking Agile development projects; and HP Performance Anywhere helps resolve application performance issues before they impact business services by providing visibility and predictive analytics.
Targeting a New Class of Applications for Mobile, Web, and Cloud
“With both Agile Manager and Performance Anywhere, we are targeting a really new class of applications that are being built - mobile applications, web applications, applications that are being built both using the cloud - maybe partially being deployed on the cloud, or completely being deployed on the cloud,” Subbu Iyer, vice president, Product and Strategy, Software, HP, said during a recent meeting in New York.
The product introductions are the culmination of research and development that HP has invested into what the company considers to be a new style of IT consumption and new style of application development, added Matt Morgan, vice president, Hybrid IT and Cloud Product Marketing, HP Software. “There are major trends that are influencing the collapse of the application lifecycle. I use the phrase collapse of the lifecycle to really talk about how people are under pressure to get changes out to market more quickly, to ensure that those changes are aligned more tightly to business demand, and ensure that customers have an ideal user experience.” The fundamental driver for this pressure is competition, noted Morgan. “With mobile devices and mobile apps and web applications now becoming literally storefronts, business models are now dependent on having feature-rich applications in the hands of customer earlier and ensuring that the user experience of those applications is perfect and that the consumption of those applications is error-free.”
Agile Development
HP Agile Manager is intended to enable collaboration with visibility into tasks, metrics and progress — whether for a single group or for multiple, geographically distributed teams across the enterprise. According to the company, the solution simplifies planning and capacity management across Agile teams by providing insight into projects, including the status of tasks and potential issues or bottlenecks impacting progress; enhances insight into application quality with advanced source-code and build-management analytics for comprehensive traceability, rapid assessment of change and risk analysis; fosters collaboration through integrated development environment (IDE) integrations that allow developers to work with the tool of their choice, yet still work together to share information with other team members; and improves visibility into projects with real-time updates via customizable dashboards, which include metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). HP Agile Manager also provides two-way synchronization with HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and HP Quality Center for enterprise quality management and continuous testing capabilities.
Agile development is replacing the waterfall approach, said Morgan. “The whole idea of Agile development is to do away with the long lifecycle and go to small iterations with the goal of delivering something that works at the end of each iteration,” he explains. Another principle is the idea of an Agile team with constant feedback and revisions between business analysts, scrum managers, developers, testers, lines of business owners. The idea is to build something in a week and it is going to work, and you are going to see value and if you are off, you have only lost a week’s worth of time, and you can go back and fix it. “That process is now becoming the preferred route for next-generation software apps in certain categories.”
Application Performance
The Agile concept doesn’t just describe how software is developed. It also talks about how it is managed, said Morgan, citing the industry trend DevOps. The idea behind DevOps is to bring operations and development into one seamless virtual team where the systems talk to each other and they have the capacity to normalize the conversation about how the application is working and performing. “This announcement also contains a piece on the Ops side that is tightly integrated to complete that equation and that is called Performance Anywhere. It is a technology that allow users to manage end user performance, ensuring performance and availability all over the world so that if there is an issue, your development team knows exactly what caused the issue, what the impact is to your users, and how to correct it.”
The second new product, HP Performance Anywhere, monitors applications across the web, via the cloud and in mobile environments. Now delivered as a service, it improves application performance while reducing up-front costs and lengthy implementations so clients can achieve faster time to value with automated, self-provisioned management and a simple-to-use interface; improve brand equity with smart analytics that understand historic norms and detect abnormal performance to proactively identify potential problems; and resolve performance issues more quickly using an embedded social collaboration technology.
HP Performance Anywhere integrates with HP Agile Manager and HP Quality Center to further promote collaboration across development, test and operations teams to better align IT with business priorities.
“There is a reason that we are launching the two products together,” noted Iyer. “It makes a whole lot of sense in the context of DevOps. We also built in tight integration between these two solutions. When we look at DevOps, the concept is helping Dev and Ops teams to work together, better and more quickly both to push change that is coming from the application development teams to production, and also if issues surface in production, to remediate and resolve them as quickly as possible by working in a collaborative fashion. We really see DevOps as an evolution of Agile.”
HP Agile Manager is available by subscription at www.hp.com/go/agilemanager.
Information on how to participate in the HP Performance Anywhere beta program is available at www.hp.com/go/performanceanywhere.