ARCAD Reorganizes Product Suite, Hooks Into Rational Team Concert

April 19, 2011 Alex Woodie

ARCAD Software made a big change of product strategy last month when it announced an integration with IBM‘s Rational Team Concert change management software. The company also announced a reorganization of its product offerings, and said it will look for growth from three products.

ARCAD has been moving toward more openness and platform support with its suite of tools for a while. In recent years, the company has moved beyond its original IBM i marketplace to deliver application lifecycle management (ALM) tools for Windows, Linux, and Unix users.

The big change with ARCAD’s version 8.10, which it just released, is the company no longer demands to house the source code repository. If customers want, they can assign that task to IBM’s Rational Team Concert (RTC) product, which was unveiled more than two years ago and has since had an impact on the market for IBM i change management software.

In addition to getting “Ready for Rational” certification, ARCAD has also split its product suite with version 8.10, which the company says will make it easier and less expensive for customers to obtain the component pieces.

Going forward, the company says it will focus on three products, including Transformer, Datachanger, and Deliver. Transformer and Datachanger provide Unicode code conversion and data configuration management capabilities, respectively.

ARCAD’s Deliver is a multi-platform release-management tool that supports deployment of code to IBM i, Linux, Windows, and Unix servers. The company is also selling Deliver Extension for RTC to organizations that want to manage code using RTC.

While ARCAD is now playing nice with a product that it previously competed with, it will continue to sell its source code repository and surrounding process tools, including Skipper.

ARCAD says the “profound reorganization of our product structure” marks the beginning “a new era” in its product development. “Right from the start we have always prioritized openness in our development strategy,” Philippe Magne, CEO and chairman of ARCAD, says in a press release. “The base ARCAD architecture allows us to quickly adapt and interact with new standards. This strategy is now paying off.”