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AS OF 5/17/2008 6:11AM EST
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Throwing Down Gauntlet
Test system first deliverable under Borland’s Open ALM
By Jeff Feinman
February 15, 2007 —
Espousing a new approach to application life-cycle management, Borland Software has delivered the first product from its latest line of thinking.
The company in late January released Gauntlet, a build and test automation system that can work with any type of version control system and isolate data defects until they can be fixed. The product can also handle plug-ins for security tools such as Cenzic’s Hailstorm and Fortify’s Source Code Analysis software.
Rob Cheng, vice president of product marketing for Borland, said that the goal of Gauntlet is to enable development teams to identify problems earlier in the life cycle.
Gauntlet is the newest piece of the company’s quality management product suite, which includes SilkPerformer, SilkTest and SilkCentral Test Manager, tools the company picked up with its acquisition of Segue Software. Gauntlet also can be integrated with version control systems such as Borland’s StarTeam and Subversion.
“There are other solutions that can essentially capture metrics from a variety of sources, whether it be security analysis, license compliance results, etc.,” Cheng said. “With Gauntlet, you can see a bad trend from the beginning of a project.”
Gauntlet is the first product under a strategy Borland is calling Open ALM. That term is defined by Borland as offering customers the ability to use any combination of life-cycle tools, whether they be commercial or open source, and catering to a broad range of platforms. It also looks to automate third-party data collection.
Tod Nielsen, president and CEO of Borland, said that the products will be based on open standards and easy to work with.
“Today, we clarify our position within a market that is quickly fragmenting into two segments: those that support a flexible, customer-centric approach to ALM, and those that are promoting closed, monolithic approaches,” Nielsen said. “Open ALM is our stake in the game, and Borland will fight for the rights of our customers who are passionate about driving the next generation of software productivity on their terms.”
Borland is not the only company that follows this type of ALM strategy; nexB, an Eclipse Foundation member that offers ALM tools, has a similar philosophy of using open processes and tools to develop software.
Nielsen said that over the next 24 months, the company will evolve its existing products into an open architecture based on open standards that will enable customers to plug in third-party tools. The company says that future enhancements will focus on offering a view of the entire software delivery process, with metrics from all of the supporting roles in ALM.
Of course, Borland has seen lots of change over the past couple of years. In 2005, Borland’s ALM offerings were centered around Core SDP, which the company based off of Eclipse. But in October 2006, Borland moved away from the role-based Core SDP system in favor of four suites. During the same month, the company announced that after having its IDE business up for sale for nine months, it would retain ownership of its developer tools group and have it operate under a subsidiary known as CodeGear.
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