News

Aldon manages development process, life cycle

• By Michael Alexander
• September 8, 2004

Aldon, out of Emeryville, Calif., has been making the rounds of trade magazines to tout its recent support for IBM eServer i5, as well as its certification by IBM of its application life-cycle manager plug-ins for WebSphere V5.1.

The plug-ins are free to customers. 'By implementing a team repository, objects managed through Aldon can be shared by all members of a development team and can be treated as a single unit in any change management operation,' says Dan Magid, president and CEO at Aldon.

Aldon's Application Lifetime Management Suite consists of a life-cycle manager that gives users a unified view of enterprise app configuration and change management; a deployment manager that distributes components in production; and a community manager that acts as an automated service desk and exchanges information.

The company claims to be the first software configuration and change management vendor to provide centralized and integrated app dev support for the operating systems that make up the i5, including i5/OS, AIX 5L, Linux and Windows.

Magid says Aldon plans to release its app development management suite on Linux and Unix in the first quarter of next year. 'We manage not only the development process but also the entire life cycle,' he says. 'Most of our competitors are still focused only on the development life cycle.'

The importance of application configuration and change management has been increasing in synch with the trend to export development work overseas, notes Magid. 'The biggest unexpected cost of outsourcing is managing remote development,' he says.

On the other side of the desk, developers who worry their jobs will be exported 'need to be more visible so that the organizations you work for understand the value you provide,' Magid says. 'Most CEOs have no idea what goes into development.' These execs compare hourly rates for domestic and foreign developers and use them to make what they believe is a sound business decision, he adds. The same executives are not aware of how quickly costs can escalate if the quality of the code is poor, for example.

With deeper insight into the development process, and a clear understanding of the costs, outsourcing may not seem like such a good deal after all, Magid concludes.

Links: Further information on Aldon is available at http://www.aldon.com

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