Earlier this year, as part of a team of HP experts, I spoke at numerous special interest group meetings, including one in Dublin. Under the banner of ‘delivering velocity and quality for the new style of application delivery’, we spoke to clients and other interested parties about the race for better business performance.
Examining just how this task has changed in an era where the demands of the customer are constantly evolving was obviously a major point of interest for those in attendance. An issue for many companies up to this point may be achieving delivery speed when rolling out new applications while improving quality at the same time.
Indeed, some see these as incompatible goals. However, this is not the case and leading organisations are showing the way to achieve both while reducing cost. Indeed, a huge number of IT decision-makers at multinationals and other large organisations have earmarked large parts of their annual IT budgets towards application modernisation.
Boosting agility and innovation, this type of investment allows an organisation to gain control over complex processes and support the transformation of their applications portfolio to deliver an immediately effective enterprise solution.
While in Dublin, my colleagues and I spoke about how the latest version of our Application Lifecycle Management solution, Apps 12, can help in this process. Apps 12 enables IT to manage the application life cycle and connects the delivery of applications from project proposal right the way through to operation.
Unified to accelerate
A unified system to accelerate the reliable, secure delivery of software applications and services across heterogeneous environment, it enables customers to deliver high quality performance applications with unprecedented velocity and uncompromising standards and security.
As part of the Apps 12 release there are a number of main focal areas that we’re looking towards. First up is performance testing, an integral part of any application release. As part of V12, we deliver cloud testing, allowing companies to leverage the cloud to enable them build, test and deliver applications faster, with higher quality and that scale to any level.
If you are thinking about a project that has to be agile in nature, the last thing that you are going to want to do is have costly overheads in terms of getting a testing environment in place — the longer it takes your business to carry out that process, the slower you deliver
Therefore, the big leap with Apps 12 is that rather than having to provision a costly infrastructure for a testing process, you can use a cloud-based model instead. It allows you to actually set up the capability to carry out performance testing in a virtual environment. In turn, the whole dynamic around the release changes — allowing it to be drive forward at speed without compromising on quality.
Continuous test and integration
When you have to look towards continuous testing and continuous integration. Providing your IT teams the ability to test at the application programming interface (API) level of the application is a major step forward. In the past, the way many companies have handled testing has all been centred on the graphical user interface (GUI) level.
That leaves you waiting for the application to be fully available before you carry out the end-to-end test. That is just no longer an acceptable process, you have to drive testing continuously through the middle of an application release process. While some may still see delivering continuous changes within the organisation as a fast but ultimately risky process, with Apps 12, that’s no longer the case.
The next key point in relation to Apps 12 unsurprisingly relates to the mobility question. Mobile is such a huge area because business want apps and if they want apps they’re going to get them. The bigger question for those in the delivery business of those apps is how they can provide a product in a manner that’s fast and do so with a lot of quality, ie lots of small changes that are released with the five-star quality rating.
After all mobile applications in particular demand rapid development and delivery of high-quality solutions. In order to keep up with the speed of mobile application development and testing, the teams involved must have solutions that enable automation of functional testing on real devices.
Moving from manual
What Apps 12 offers is a route that allows you to move on from the manual process of testing mobile applications across multiple devices and multiple operating systems to automating that activity, saving enormous amounts of time in the bargain.
Using Apps12, you are speeding up the process involved dramatically, with the option of doing so in the cloud or on-premise, across effectively thousands of different devices, on different operating systems and across all types of flavours of what people need. In short this means V12 is providing flexibility to our customers to use the available tools however they want to use them on their projects.
In addition to all of this, as part of our Apps 12 offering we have done a lot of work in terms of the simplification of our licence models as well as the manner in which you can use the tools involved. For instance, as part of the Apps 12 release we made sure there are ‘freemium’ offers available. Because of that it is now possible for companies, particularly smaller ones, to start receiving the benefits of our solutions, even for small projects.
Growing demand
What is clear though is that the demand is growing for the type of functionalities which our Apps 12 solution provides. We are seeing a lot of interest from a large number of companies across the globe who are all directing large amounts of energy towards driving application development projects.
Those businesses want to be innovative and while some may still ask the simple question of ‘how do you best go about starting this process’, we can assure you it doesn’t have to be daunting. There is no silver bullet, you can begin small and you can drive the process on from there, you can invest heavily from the start as well.
But the main thing is to make that start.
Toby Marsden is BDM director, HP Software EMEA.
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