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  • Aldon Says SOA, Web 2.0 Apps and Compliance Drive ALM Sales

    October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    A few weeks ago, executives from application lifecycle management software maker Aldon met with me to chat about what’s going on in the wake of the company’s acquisition by private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners. At the time, Matt Scholl, Aldon’s president and chief operating officer said that the company was talking to users about how they make use of ALM products, and last week the company released some interesting statistics describing how and why companies are using these tools.

    To get a better handle on why its existing customers buy its ALM products and therefore help Aldon sell ALM tools to new customers, the company in August and September did a survey of 400 of its 1,300 customers, which has to rank among the most statistically significant sampling ever done in polls in the history of polling. The fact that Aldon can get such a high percentage of its customers to go through a survey is remarkable.

    As companies using Aldon’s products move to applications created with a services oriented architecture or using so-called Web 2.0 tools, they seem to want to have ALM tools to control what they are doing. (This stands to reason, of course. Companies that have ALM tools want to use them to control how any of their applications are created, and compliance regulations at public companies or those engaged in specific industries also have compliance rules that restrict access to data and applications.) Of the Aldon shops polled, 62 percent of respondents said that they were developing Web services or implementing SOA-style applications, and more than a third of the shops polled said that they were using Aldon’s ALM tools to manage the development process for these applications.

    Almost half of the customers surveyed by Aldon said that they are outsourcing application development or managing geographically distributed programming teams. While these are different approaches to coding from an accounting and political point of view, outsourced teams and distributed teams present the same challenges to the companies trying to create new applications or to extend existing ones. Companies want to be able to control how applications are revved, tested, and rolled into production, no matter who is pressing the Enter key. (Aldon said that it has one customer that has programming teams in four countries with over 100 people accessing the ALM system.)

    “Rapid change and fierce competition are forcing today’s businesses to be more responsive to market pressures than ever before,” explained Scholl in a statement accompanying the survey results. “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.”

    And because compliance is such a big issue these days, it comes as no surprise that 57 percent of the Aldon shops surveyed say they are using its ALM products as part of their regulatory compliance; of those who are using ALM tools for compliance, two-thirds say that Sarbanes-Oxley regulations are the reason why they are doing it. There are some organizations that have been affected by the Patriot Act in the United States, or HIPAA regulations in healthcare and Basel II regulations in financial services.

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    Tags: Tags: mtfh_rc, Volume 16, Number 41 -- October 22, 2007

    Sponsored by
    UCG Technologies – Vault400

    Do the Math When Looking at IBM i Hosting for Cost Savings

    COVID-19 has accelerated certain business trends that were already gaining strength prior to the start of the pandemic. E-commerce, telehealth, and video conferencing are some of the most obvious examples. One example that may not be as obvious to the general public but has a profound impact on business is the shift in strategy of IBM i infrastructure from traditional, on-premises environments to some form of remote configuration. These remote configurations and all of their variations are broadly referred to in the community as IBM i hosting.

    “Hosting” in this context can mean different things to different people, and in general, hosting refers to one of two scenarios. In the first scenario, hosting can refer to a client owned machine that is housed in a co-location facility (commonly called a co-lo for short) where the data center provides traditional system administrator services, relieving the client of administrative and operational responsibilities. In the second scenario, hosting can refer to an MSP owned machine in which partition resources are provided to the client in an on-demand capacity. This scenario allows the client to completely outsource all aspects of Power Systems hardware and the IBM i operating system and database.

    The scenario that is best for each business depends on a number of factors and is largely up for debate. In most cases, pursuing hosting purely as a cost saving strategy is a dead end. Furthermore, when you consider all of the costs associated with maintaining and IBM i environment, it is typically not a cost-effective option for the small to midsize market. The most cost-effective approach for these organizations is often a combination of a client owned and maintained system (either on-prem or in a co-lo) with cloud backup and disaster-recovery-as-a-service. Only in some cases of larger enterprise companies can a hosting strategy start to become a potentially cost-effective option.

    However, cost savings is just one part of the story. As IBM i expertise becomes scarce and IT resources run tight, the only option for some firms may be to pursue hosting in some capacity. Whatever the driving force for pursing hosting may be, the key point is that it is not just simply an option for running your workload in a different location. There are many details to consider and it is to the best interest of the client to work with an experienced MSP in weighing the benefits and drawbacks of each option. As COVID-19 rolls on, time will tell if IBM i hosting strategies will follow the other strong business trends of the pandemic.

    When we say do the math in the title above, it literally means that you need to do the math for your particular scenario. It is not about us doing the math for you, making a case for either staying on premises or for moving to the cloud. There is not one answer, but just different levels of cost to be reckoned which yield different answers. Most IBM i shops have fairly static workloads, at least measured against the larger mix of stuff on the public clouds of the world. How do you measure the value of controlling your own IT fate? That will only be fully recognized at the moment when it is sorely missed the most.

    CONTINUE READING ARTICLE

    Please visit ucgtechnologies.com/IBM-POWER9-systems for more information.

    800.211.8798 | info@ucgtechnologies.com

    Article featured in IT Jungle on April 5, 2021

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    Reader Feedback: More on Vendor Names and Changing System Names Talend Adds i5/OS Support to Open Source ETL Tool

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TFH Volume: 16 Issue: 41

This Issue Sponsored By

    Table of Contents

    • Reader Feedback on AS/400s Are From Rochester, RS/6000s Are From Austin
    • IT Managers Do Really Well in Europe, Fair in North America
    • State of the System i: First-Hand Reports from Second-Hand Dealers
    • Green Computing Tops Gartner’s List of 10 Hottest Technologies
    • System i Sales Drop Again in Q3, IBM Says Little
    • Aldon Says SOA, Web 2.0 Apps and Compliance Drive ALM Sales
    • IBM Hit by Financial Services Slowdown in Q3
    • Hitachi Predicts 4 TB Disk Drives by 2011
    • Mad Dog 21/21: Symphony for the Devil
    • Oracle Planning Reorganization in Application Group?

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    • Do The Math When Looking at IBM i Hosting For Cost Savings
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