"We think that you really have to have integrated application life-cycle management, and it's really the existence of three capabilities—linking artifacts between different stages of ALM; change management; and configuration management of every artifact in the repository—implemented within a single platform that defines the bar for ALM," said Philip Deck, CEO of MKS. "If people can't get those capabilities, they just have a bunch of tools and that really doesn't achieve the objective."

However, when MKS talks about integration, they mean having all steps of ALM, from requirements definition to deployment, operating seamlessly in one product. That is a far cry from what companies like Kovair and Urbancode are talking about when discussing integration. Those companies take an ALM 2.0 approach, which allows third-party, brand-agnostic integration with nearly all other types of other application life-cycle management. MKS has certain linking capabilities, but it offers a single product instead of an integration bus.  

“We believe that there are great tools in many different areas that we don’t cover, like ClearCase, Perforce, Subversion, etc., so there are tools in areas which we don’t think we could add any more value,” said Sky Basu CTO and president of Kovair. “So rather than trying to replace any of those tools, we integrate with them. By doing that, we don’t ask our customers to replace any of their existing tools even when we have a tool in the same category.”

So those are two very different concepts falling under the same word. Be careful who you integrate with.