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Bold Advancements in Requirements
Management, Packaged Application Change Management and Test
Management
Waterloo, ON –
July 17, 2007: MKS Inc. announced today bold new
extensions to its application lifecycle management (ALM) platform, MKS
Integrity, becoming the first and only ALM vendor to offer:
- Revolutionary support for
requirements change management, reuse, persistence and baselining
- Enforced process control SAP and
Oracle/Peoplesoft change management,
- Unified test management, and
All within MKS's ALM 2.0 platform
framework.
"Since 2001, MKS has been
progressively building out a next generation ALM platform that fulfils the ALM
2.0 vision set out by industry analyst such as Forrester and Gartner," says
Philip Deck, CEO, MKS. "This release takes innovation from MKS to an entirely
new level, and delivers groundbreaking capabilities for reuse, packaged
application change management and usability enhancements supporting a much
broader deployment of ALM across IT disciplines. MKS's ability to leap frog the
competition on multiple fronts is due to our built-by-design, single platform
and unique, unified data model enabling development (ALM) and operational (IT
Service Management/ITIL) data to be joined within a single system. One day all
ALM solutions will be compared against MKS's unified model as the competition
and their customers continue to struggle with the integration of various
disparate point tools."
Announcing Next Generation
Requirements Management
Business strategies such as
Software Product Lines and SOA and the sheer pace of innovation demand IT
organizations reuse requirements, test specifications and documentation in
parallel development scenarios while maintaining traceability throughout the
lifecycle.
Leveraging MKS's longstanding
expertise in software configuration management (SCM), MKS is proud to be first
to market with support for:
- Unified requirements
change management allowing individual requirements or documents to follow their
own lifecycle path;
- Requirements reuse
and persistence - a unique capability allowing for groups of requirements to be
associated and re-used in a parallel development scenario
- Requirements
versioning and baselines - providing the ability to securely identify a point in
history for a requirement or document, and navigate the system based on that
baseline, and begin new work with the baseline as a starting point.
MKS is unique in offering this
capability. No traditional, first generation requirements management vendor can
offer reuse capabilities of this power, and no vendor other than MKS has the
core platform architecture to do so in the near term. The combined power of
database-centric and document-centric capabilities allows for rich mining of
data and ease of use in managing the extensive documentation and specifications
typically associated with managing thousands of requirements.
This release also expands MKS's
requirements solution with a new document view and rich text support providing
business analysts with the ability to author requirements in a traditional and
familiar document format.
"We looked at the market
extensively for a solution to manage our requirements and it became very clear
that only one solution provided a complete integration with our development and
test environments, and this was MKS Integrity," says Tom Clark, Head of Quality
Implementation, HSBC plc. "Now, with MKS Integrity 2007, we have the ability to
not only integrate all requirements right to down to the source code, and across
to quality management, but also have the capability to represent these
requirements as interrelated items in an easy to manage document, complete with
rich text and other document management features."
"Companies in consumer electronics,
automotive manufacturing, and other industries heavily reliant on embedded
systems development are craving reuse that really works. Strategic, planned
reuse of requirements, test plans and source code allows these organizations to
amortize investments in these critical software assets for greater benefit,
accelerated innovation, and predictable results," says Bola Rotibi, Application
Lifecycle Management Analyst, Ovum.
Announcing Support for Packaged
Application Change Management
MKS becomes the first ALM vendor to
offer robust solutions for enforced SAP and Oracle/PeopleSoft change management
within its single ALM platform. ERP implementations, upgrades and enhancements
consume millions in IT dollars and years of staff time. MKS Integrity's powerful
process automates what is currently a painful, spreadsheet-based manual effort,
driving down risk, expense and complexity.
"Change management in complex ERP
environments is fraught with risk. Despite the critical nature of these systems,
change processes are frequently manual, are poorly documented and often
difficult to audit. Automation and visibility over change management processes
and procedures is viewed to be an instrumental requirement for risk management
and sound IT governance," says Jim Duggan, Research Vice President, Gartner.
Announcing Unified Test
Management
MKS becomes the first ALM vendor to
deliver test management as an integral part of the ALM platform. Unlike other
stand-alone vendor offerings, MKS Integrity's test management capability breaks
down the walls between business analysts, development and QA, liberating teams
from their silos to collaborate and communicate. Organizations demanding
requirements-based development and testing can now fully unify these processes.
"Unifying the test process function
into the overall application lifecycle is a key differentiating ability provided
by MKS. When information resides in various point tools, the result is
fragmented, disconnected information flow which we believe is a significant
barrier to productivity and innovation. MKS's unified lifecycle approach frees
our organization to collaborate effectively and respond quickly," says Frank
Gauld, Vice President, Global Software Engineering, NCR Financial Services
Division.
Announcing Software Configuration
Management (SCM) Advancements for Increased Developer
Productivity
Building on its enviable SCM
legacy, MKS is releasing new capabilities that will directly benefit to its core
software developer audience including a new streamlined locking model,
supporting optimistic locking, non-exclusive locking and exclusive locking of
files. This new approach to lock management enables development teams to specify
their collaborative model in line with their project requirements.
Availability
MKS Integrity 2007 is available
directly from MKS, and for current customers can be downloaded from MKS's
customer community. For pricing and sales information, please contact your MKS
sales representative at 1-800-613-7535 (North America), +44- 1483-733919
(UK), +49-711-351775-0
(Germany) or +65-6832-5534 (Asia
Pacific).
About
MKS
MKS is the premier provider of
application lifecycle management solutions for the global 1000. MKS's flagship
ALM solution, MKS Integrity, is the most highly integrated ALM platform in the
industry today, spanning all aspects of the software development lifecycle and
supporting critical business transformations including SOA, application
rationalization and outsourcing. MKS Integrity's single architecture drives high
levels of user productivity, facilitates rapid deployment and process
standardization while delivering a complete view of application development
activity through real time metrics, trends and reporting. MKS Integrity also
provides essential support for IT operations through software deployment and
issue management. Founded in 1984, MKS serves more than 10,000 customers in
countries across the world. Whether through deployment of MKS's solution
strategically on an enterprise scale, or by leveraging individual components to
solve project-level challenges, our customers can use MKS's software to enable
higher levels of process maturity, better manage global development activity and
safeguard their most critical business applications and software assets. Under
its widely known MKS Toolkit brand, MKS also provides UNIX-Windows co-existence
and system administration that significantly cut development and administrative
costs and reduce time to market, while enabling enhanced performance. More
information about MKS can be found at http://www.mks.com or by calling 1-800-265-2797
(US & Canada),
+49-711-351775-0 (Germany),
+44-1483-733900 (United
Kingdom) and 1-519-884-2251 (Rest of World).
Copyright © 2007 MKS Inc. and MKS
Toolkit are trademarks or registered trademarks of MKS Inc. All other trademarks
mentioned in this release are the property of their respective owners.
This news release contains
forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, which may cause
actual results to differ materially from the statements made. When used in this
document, the words "may", "would", "could", "will", "intend", "plan",
"anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect" and similar expressions are
intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements reflect the
Company's current views with respect to future events and are subject to such
risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause our actual results to differ
materially from the statements made including those factors detailed from time
to time in filings made by the Company with Canadian securities regulatory
authorities. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or
should assumptions underlying the forward looking statements prove incorrect,
actual results may vary materially from those described herein as intended,
planned, anticipated or expected. Although the Company believes the expectations
represented by such forward looking statements are reasonable, there can be no
assurance that those expectations will prove to be correct. The Company does not
intend and does not assume any obligation to update these forward-looking
statements.
US and Canada
Media Contact:
Ellyn Winters-Robinson, VP
Marketing
MKS Inc.
Phone: 519-883-4346
Email: ellyn@mks.com
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