Trade organizations offer professionals a way to meet new colleagues, find out about job opportunities, get discounts and learn more about the field they've chosen. Developers have access to tons of different developer networks -- you've got the Android Developers' blog, the iOS developer network, Windows has one and RIM does too, but wouldn't it be nice to have access to tips and tricks for all those, in one place?

That's the goal of the Application Developers Alliance, a newly formed non-profit trade organization. Their goal, according to Jake Ward, head of communications, is to be the voice of the development industry, agnostic of process/language and platform, globally. The Alliance is free to join (for the time being), has no age restrictions and hopes to offer more discounts beyond the ones they're currently offering, which include some savings on Rackspace hosting and app dev training courses.

Check out the site -- the Alliance Network functions like LinkedIn and allows you to communicate with other developers, share tips, view message boards and search job postings.

Ward said the organization does not aim to discredit any work others have done in the past -- in fact, he said, he starts off most interactions with Meetups and other organizations by acknowledging the great work they've done so far and then asking how the Alliance can help.

As of right now, the Alliance has about 2300 members, many of are based in the US, but approximately 700 are based internationally.

Will you join the Alliance? Do you think there is a need for this?

To learn more visit the website, follow them on Twitter and like them on Facebook.

Theresa Lanowitz, founder of Voke, Inc. an independent technology analyst firm, said to only talk about breaking down the silos between the development and operations teams would be myopic; the conversation, she added, needs to include the architects, the QA team and business analysts.

“Dev Ops is a faddish term. We’ve spoken for the past 10 years about breaking down the silos,” Lanowitz said, adding that software developers need to look at transforming the whole lifecycle and evaluate the entire supply chain in order to continue evolving the application lifecycle management process. 

Conversations and connectivity between teams, with a focus on their individual skills is an important part of the process, she said.

Developers will not become operations professionals and operations will not become developers, Lanowitz said, they will still each have their own specialized skills, but they should be able to connect with one another about software development projects. It is part of the idea in ALM that traditional IT is merging with embedded systems, something we’ll be featuring in our story about Voke’s recent ALM survey.

Are you breaking the silos? Are you a business analyst or software architect working with developers? Email vreitano@bzmedia.com; we’d love to hear your side of the story.

Companies have begun to expand their ALM portfolios in the past year, mostly through acquisitions of other application lifecycle management providers. Borland was acquired by Micro Focus, Rocket acquired Aldon and as of June 1, the acquisition of MKS by PTC, a product lifecycle management company, will be complete.

Bola Rotibi, research director at Creative Intellect Consulting, said it is a wise move for companies to bring application and product lifecycle management together, however, it could present challenges for other companies in the space.

"This shakes up IBM Rational and their past purchase of Telelogic," Rotibi said.

She added that product lifecycle management is more about the physical hardware and about bringing together a bill of materials. ALM, she noted, has been evolving and is more about governance.

"Software developers think of ALM as SDLC [software development lifecycle] and it is all about the management and maintenance of software products," Rotibi said.

A company to watch in the space, in Rotibi's opinion, is Serena software. She also said that some companies, like Siemens, are trying to build out their own ALM versions instead of acquiring other companies.

It appears to be all about selling into both markets for the companies that are acquiring ALM vendors at this point in time, Rotibi said.

What do you think? Do you, like Rotibi, think development is all about governance and management? Do you think these factors influence the acquisitions? Share your opinions with us.

Gathering data about what's happening in your data center is well-defined. Gathering data about what's happening in a globally distributed development team, using different tools and writing to different platforms, has been more problematic. CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli, in speaking with me about today's announced acquisition of Danube Technologies (makers of the ScrumWorks Pro agile project management software), described how combining IT ops data with so-called "developer operations" data can save organizations big dollars. Often, IT operations teams get singular development stacks to deploy, which create what Portelli called "spiraling and recurring investments in one-off people, process and technology." While data center consolidation and virtualization can drive business value, real gains still can be made in "application rationalization," the move toward certified infrastructure stacks that will reduce the costs of application monitoring, hardware, servers and people. A company's best system architects and IT operations personnel create these certified stacks and make them available to development teams early in the design process. The stacks, Portelli explained, are backed up by the architects and IT personnel, with whom developers can collaborate with respect to design decisions, implementation and more. In essence, he said, once applications get to the deployment stage, it is understood they will work in the data center due to what he called the "correct by construction" development process. The end result is more streamlined development, higher-quality applications, more interoperability and dramatically reduced costs of operations and lifecycle support. Some organizations go so far as to hire people knowledgable in the certified stacks, which continues to drive this collaborative behavior.

The acquisition of the venerable software development tool maker is complete. For those who go back to Phillipe Kahn and Turbo Pascal, and have come to know the great developer products the company turned out, it must seem impossible that the company could not retain its position atop the market. For those who came on board during the Dale Fuller/Inprise era, the company's demise seems to be the logical conclusion to a period of mismanagement, ever-changing market strategies and lack of focus.

Despite all that, there was never a question about the quality of engineering. People who used Borland tools always raved about them. Now, as part of Micro Focus, the tools—now for application life-cycle management—will again get all the attention. While Borland's CodeGear developer legacy lives on at Embarcadero, its ALM solution has found a home at Micro Focus.

In an announcement today, Micro Focus said this acquisition, combined with the company's purchase of Compuware software quality products, will extend the Micro Focus offerings in the testing/quality market that is adjacent to its core in application management and modernization.

"The Borland and Compuware businesses are highly complementary, both to each other and to the Micro Focus...business," said Stephen Kelly, CEO of Micro Focus.

So long, Borland. It was a good, long run.