EMERYVILLE, Calif.--Aldon, the leading provider of process-driven application lifecycle management (ALM) solutions, today announced the results of a global customer survey revealing leading organizations are using Aldon ALM to help manage business-critical IT initiatives ranging from Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to compliance to outsourcing, in an effort to bring processes to the development lifecycle. The survey was conducted to help better understand companies’ top priorities for using ALM solutions and the market forces driving its adoption.

The survey, which was completed by more than 400 Aldon customers in August and September of 2007, revealed that 62 percent of respondents are currently developing web services or implementing SOA, and more than a third are using Aldon ALM to manage the development. The results demonstrate the surge in Web 2.0 development taking place in leading IT organizations worldwide. Unitrin Specialty, a leading auto insurance provider, is a key Aldon customer benefiting from Aldon ALM to manage its SOA development for extending web services out to agents and brokers.

“Aldon delivers a logical metadata registry so we can easily search and locate services, which creates more reuse of services and code across the department,” said Jason Whorrall, Rating Applications development, Unitrin Specialty. “With Aldon we have gained process management across our SOA and traditional application development that accommodates our complex IT environment.”

The survey also showed that nearly 50 percent of the respondents are outsourcing application development or managing geographically distributed teams. One leading financial services customer is running a major network of geographically distributed IT teams across four countries, where Aldon is currently accessed by more than 100 users. With Aldon, the company gains standardized IT processes across the organization so issues are tracked from the time they are raised to resolution and managers can identify potential trouble spots in advance and act accordingly.

The importance of compliance issues is also highlighted by the results, with over 57 percent of respondents using Aldon’s solution to address regulatory issues and compliance. Of these, the majority – 67 percent - are using it for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Other compliance initiatives mentioned include PCI, ITIL, HIPAA, Basel II and The Patriot Act. Masterbrand Cabinets, Inc. is an ideal example of compliance done right by implementing Aldon ALM.

“With Aldon in place, MasterBrand Cabinets now has an automated, structured, and repeatable software development process so we can successfully meet our SOX testing requirements without any complications,” states William Storey, Corporate IT compliance officer, MasterBrand Cabinets.

“Rapid change and fierce competition are forcing today’s businesses to be more responsive to market pressures than ever before,” said Matt Scholl, president and chief operating officer at Aldon. “With IT running many of the core processes that businesses rely on for daily operations, Aldon’s goal is to provide our customers with process-driven solutions that help them meet business requirements and build competitive advantage.”

Analysts widely accept that the adoption of effective ALM solutions enables IT organizations to manage increasingly complex software development that results from offshoring, outsourcing, distributed development, compliance, and emerging SOA initiatives.

In Gartner’s February 2007 report titled Key Issues for AD Tools: Life Cycle Management Tools, VP and senior research analyst Jim Duggan states, “Users of IT are looking to ‘manage IT like a business,’ with improved auditability, manageability and predictability.” Duggan emphasizes that, “Lifecycle management solutions seek to deliver software and applications within budget and on schedule. Distributed development teams, shorter schedules and more complex architectures will require increased capabilities for planning and control throughout software and application lifecycles.”

Aldon has more than 1,300 customers including AIG, Boeing, Caterpillar, Del Monte Foods, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, Nintendo, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Sony, Time Warner Cable, Victoria’s Secret and Volvo.

The Aldon Suite

The Aldon ALM solution provides IT business process automation, requirements management, software configuration management, multiple version management and software deployment to companies worldwide. Built to address complex multi-platform environments as well as the needs of geographically distributed IT organizations, the Aldon Suite gives companies a defined, repeatable, measurable and traceable process for every stage of their application and services development. The integrated suite is comprised of Aldon Lifecycle Manager, Aldon Deployment Manager and Aldon Community Manager.

About Aldon

Aldon is the leading provider of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions, bringing the benefits of process-driven application change management to IT, and accelerating the delivery of mission-critical business applications. Aldon ALM solutions support today's agile organizations by enabling IT teams to greatly improve their products' time to market, reduce business disruptions, achieve regulatory compliance and increase return on investment. More than 1,300 companies, including 70 of the Fortune 100, rely on Aldon ALM solutions for enterprise software configuration and change management for their IT business processes. Established in 1979, Aldon is headquartered in Emeryville, California and maintains 16 offices worldwide serving more than 40 countries. For more information, please visit www.aldon.com.

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