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HP unveils four developer-focused software products
Author: Mark Cox
eChannelLine USA, Mar 22, 2012

HP has announced a series of new Application Transformation solutions and services aimed at better integrating mobile-based enterprise applications into the traditional computing environment. While the services are direct, the four products announced, which are a combination of brand new and enhanced offerings, should be of interest to the channel.
"Over the last year to 18 months, we have seen the requirement of systems of engagement to grow exponentially, and line of business managers want to offer these front-end services in a mobile environment, where users can get things from the Internet, not a call center," said Paul Evans, worldwide lead for application transformation solutions at HP. "It`s clear these systems of engagement are ones companies will focus on to grow their business, rather than on backend systems."

The new software products are designed to help them do that.

"It`s a suite of software products for the development, consuming and monitoring of those products and integrating them into the backend world, and are primarily targeted at developers," Evans said.

Two of the software products are new and two are enhanced. One of the new ones is HP Enterprise Collaboration.

"It is a social media system that wraps around software development, and is designed to solve the challenges of globalization and the need to move to agile software development, said Matthew Morgan, senior director of product and solution marketing for HP Software. "If you know how to use Facebook, you know how to use this. People in the development team set their profile, and at any stage of the lifecycle they can collaborate."

The other brand new product is HP Anywhere, which increases productivity and facilitates faster decision making by enabling clients to manage IT on the go. New mobile-based applications perform operations such as portfolio request management, defect tracking, service health monitoring and the composition of an Executive Scorecard.

"It has a dashboard for iPad and for Android, with the ability to publish KPIs in real time based on progress of the lifecycle," Morgan said.

Mobile Functional Testing v 11 has undergone a significant revision through a new partnership with Perfecto Mobile.

"They have a cloud resource library of hundreds of mobile devices, which allows a tester to build one test and run it on all these devices," Morgan said. "The alternatives used to be using emulators, which don`t provide a realistic connection to the network, or bringing in the physical devices. Now they don`t have to make that decision any more, just do one test for Android and one for iOS and they can test all of them. This is a big deal."

The other enhanced offering is Application Lifecycle Intelligence (ALI) version 2.5, which reduces cycle times by offering real-time visibility and traceability of activities across the application life cycle.

"ALI provides real-time visibility to changes in the development lifecycle," Morgan said. `Developers need to know what changes occur in the lifecycle so they don`t have to test everything, because with Agile, no one has time to test everything. This allows you to trace changes to code. It works across development platforms, and is heterogeneous, not localized."

These new developer tools bring significant new channel opportunities, the HP execs said.

"Organizations are under unbelievable pressure to build out their strategies because of competition," Morgan said. "An airline has to get a mobile app out as soon as possible because of competition. The channel can bring the expertise that is unique to this new wave to their customers. It`s not software development as usual. The channel opportunity with these new technologies is to provide missing expertise as people transform their apps."

"It`s an opportunity for companies of all shapes and sizes," Evans said. "There is a huge opportunity in the integration of these devices. We believe this is a massive opportunity with is only beginning to be tapped into. Customers are struggling, and it`s a great opportunity for VARs."

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