News

HP Offers New SaaS Tools for Enterprise Agile Devs

• By John K. Waters
• February 6, 2013

HP today unveiled two new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions aimed at agile developers.

HP Agile Manager is a Web-based tool for planning, executing, and tracking Agile projects; HP Performance Anywhere (currently in beta) aims to "proactively resolve" app performance problems through predictive analytics, according to the company.

HP is responding to key trends in the industry with these products, says Subbu Iyer, vice president of products and strategy for the applications business in HP's software group -- specifically, the rise of mobile, Web and cloud-based development in an increasingly agile world.

"We're seeing the proliferation and adoption of Agile across the board," Iyer told ADTmag. "When most of our customers are starting new projects today, they ask themselves, how can we do this in an Agile way? But while Agile started really well with co-located teams in a single office, as it started permeating the organizations, working in an Agile fashion has become a challenge for globally distributed teams."

Agile Manager offers a unified environment for team collaboration, with real-time visibility into tasks, metrics, and the progress of a project. It was built "from the ground up" for SaaS, Iyer said, and it integrates with a range of IDEs and source-code and build-management systems "to pull out the relevant data."

"If you're not tracking the change that is happening and providing visibility, you can't understand the true health of the project -- its quality and the risks associated with it," Iyer said.

Performance Anywhere monitors deployed applications across the Web and mobile environments via the cloud, providing a "360-degree view" of app performance. And HP embedded a social component in the service that lets the ops team communicate directly with the dev team responsible for a particular piece of code if something goes wrong, Iyer explained.

Both services were designed to require virtually no training, Iyer said, with lots of attention paid to the user interface. "We wanted to get the software to look and behave as closely as possible to the interactions the Agile teams would have in their stand-up meetings," he said. HP wants users to be up and running in an hour, he added.

Performance Anywhere integrates with Agile Manager, and both products integrate with HP's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) suite and Quality Center. The HP ALM suite is essentially a common platform for a group of integrated tools focused on managing core app lifecycle activities, from design through delivery and operations.

The two services are part of HP's Converged Cloud strategy, unveiled last year. The Converged Cloud is a framework that includes HP's Public Cloud Services and new systems designed to support a converged infrastructure with a "developer friendly" integration with OpenStack, an open source project made up of several interrelated projects focused on delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.