HP aims to overhaul enterprise application development

HP has announced Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) 11, which the company claims is the first such system capable of delivering applications and services in an heterogeneous IT environment.

ALM 11 is a component of HP's Application Transformation tools, and has been designed to integrate with major development tools and speed the lifecycle by moving to a more 'instant-on' model of application and service provision.

"Organisations rely on applications to perform business-critical functions. Outdated tools, complex methodologies and ever progressing new technology make it difficult for IT to deliver effective applications," said Bill Veghte, HP's vice president for software and solutions.

While business application projects have traditionally been managed as separate entities, HP aims to break up these silos, allowing organisations to build a library of services and composite applications that can be combined quickly to achieve a specific business goal.

ALM helps with this process by automating workflow across applications teams, according to HP, enforcing and accelerating best practice application lifecycle management, and providing complete line of sight across teams and enterprise release trains throughout the core application lifecycle.

A new Project Planning and Tracking feature improves predictability by forecasting a project's progress. ALM automatically tracks activities and key performance indicators throughout the application lifecycle against a set of pre-defined milestones.

ALM 11 also provides the foundation for the new versions of HP Quality Center and HP Performance Center 11.0.

These tools simplify and automate application quality and performance validation, HP said, lowering operational costs while freeing up resources for new applications and services.