HP launches unified system to manage application lifecycle

In a move it says will save money and headaches – and which will be especially useful in the healthcare industry – HP has introduced what it bills as the first unified system to accelerate the reliable, secure delivery of software applications and services across heterogeneous environments.
A recent Forrester Consulting study commissioned by HP showed that 69 percent of IT decision-makers have earmarked a quarter of their annual IT budgets for application modernization, while 30 percent plan to dedicate more than 50 percent of that money.
Application modernization can help healthcare vendors gain control over complex processes and support the transformation of their applications portfolio to boost enterprise growth, agility and innovation. Executives say the new HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) 11 helps by uniting and automating the critical activities of modernizing applications  – from requirements management to quality, performance and release.
"What's driving this for us is a massive amount of work we see our customers doing in their application portfolios," said Mark Sarbiewski, vice president of products for HP Software & Solutions. "Software is driving the business these days … and we see a huge amount of investment trying to upgrade and modernize all that software so it can be faster to respond to business needs. It's a huge amount of work."
HP's ALM 11 is a role-based system that supports stakeholders in the applications delivery process and integrates with major development tools. It automates workflow processes within and across applications teams, enforcing and accelerating best practice application lifecycle management.
"Functional testing, performance testing, that's all part of one large effort that we have to do for any software package we develop," said Todd Eaton, director of the CTO Office for Development Support Services at McKesson. "In the past we had to use multiple tools to get the holistic view."
But "multiple requirements and tests, running across different platforms and coupled with new technologies can significantly affect application quality," Eaton said. "Implementing HP application modernization solutions across the entire lifecycle helped us realize savings of several million dollars over a three-year period."
HP's ALM 11 provides the foundation for the new versions of HP Quality Center and HP Performance Center 11.0 – solutions designed to help simplify and automate application quality and performance validation to lower operational costs, freeing up resources for new applications and services. This allows for accelerated application deployment by automating manual testing activities such as setting up data and manually driving repetitive tasks across multiple environments.
"Organizations rely on applications to perform business-critical functions," said Bill Veghte, executive vice president of software and solutions at HP. "Outdated tools, complex methodologies and ever progressing new technology make it difficult for IT to deliver effective applications. HP's new solutions enable clients to accelerate the delivery of applications, lower application costs and achieve business alignment without sacrificing quality."
Donald Jackson, a senior engineer (performance engineering architect, testing CoE) at Cardinal Health, said the savings could be substantial.
"We were able, with HP's diagnostics, to find some memory leaks and configuration challenges within one of our applications," he said. "Prior to go-live we were able to identify the issue and get it resolved. If we had let it go live, there would have been a chance the application would have gone down, and being how time-sensitive many of our applications are, there would have been a large financial impact to Cardinal, and possibly impact being able to get medications to our pharmacy and hospital customers."
"We believe our systems help Cardinal Health, McKesson and many others in the healthcare industry," said Sarbiewski. "Software is enormously important, both in the device side of healthcare and in IT systems for hospitals and providers. It is so pervasive. And it's hard to name an industry where it's more important to get it right. It has to be flawless."