New eBusiness application life cycle management solution from CA

Computer Associates (CA) has announced new releases of its AllFusion solutions, across three new integrated product suites, that enable customers to control the costs of developing, maintaining and managing critical eBusiness applications.

According to Tarkan Maner, CA`s vice president of corporate marketing, by improving enterprise-class development team productivity, the enhanced solutions in the AllFusion modelling, process management and change management suites can optimise the business value derived from IT investments. "Now organisations can automate application life cycle management tasks across enterprise platforms, in environments of any scale," he says.

"Time-to-market demands, and the accelerating rate of change in eBusiness have made more effective application life cycle management a strategic concern," says Maner.

"Our objective is to deliver a complete set of solutions that enable users to fulfil their life cycle management goals - ensuring their ability to cost-effectively cope with shortened development cycles while giving them the ability to adapt quickly to changing market needs and customer requirements."

Technical backgrounder

The AllFusion Modelling Suite includes new releases of AllFusion Model Manager, AllFusion ERwin Data Modeler, AllFusion Data Model Validator, AllFusion Process Modeler, and AllFusion Component Modeler, which together allow organizations to tie database and application solutions to business requirements and increase the effectiveness of cross-organization development initiatives. Enhancements include: .?New workgroup and multi-user capabilities, enabling IT organizations to further increase staff productivity and shorten development cycle times.

Model management services, including conflict resolution, versioning, security, and industry standards that make it easy to ensure that application designs accurately fulfil business requirements.

AllFusion Change Management Suite provides state-of-the-art solutions for controlling change, managing complexity, and enforcing development policies, standards and procedures. It includes:

* The beta release of AllFusion Change Manager Enterprise Workbench, which integrates complex software development processes across mainframe and distributed platforms.

* Release 5.1 of AllFusion Harvest Change Manager, which includes support for Microsoft`s Visual Studio

* NET and IBM WebSphere Studio as well as an enhanced web interface.

* Release 4.0 of AllFusion Endevor Change Manager, scheduled for beta release next month, which features UNIX System Services support.

AllFusion Process Management Suite facilitates continuous improvement of enterprise software development and delivery practices to help development teams deliver complex software systems on time and within budget.

Its integrated process and project management tools provide comprehensive process authoring, project planning, automated estimation, project scheduling, and deliverable-driven task management. The suite includes new releases of AllFusion Project Engineer, AllFusion Project Planner, AllFusion Project Timesheet, AllFusion Project Office Console, and AllFusion Advisor. Enhancements include:

* Extended support for environments such as Windows XP and Apache Tomcat.

* Redesign of web interfaces for ease-of-use and usability.

First Banking Systems, a joint venture between the Bank of Scotland and Xansa, the business consulting, IT and outsourcing company, uses AllFusion to control the application development process for its client, Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS).