Hewlett Packard has used its HP Software Universe event held in the Spanish city of Barcelona this week to introduce what it claims is the first unified system to accelerate ALM (application lifecycle management) and services across heterogeneous environments.

HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) 11 will attempt to unite and automate the activities needed to achieve the required "modernization" of applications — a process that the company says will need to encompass functions from requirements management to quality assurance, performance, and release.

A recent Forrester Consulting study commissioned by HP shows that 69 percent of IT decision-makers have earmarked a quarter of their annual IT budgets for application modernization. Putting some flesh on an arguably otherwise quite "wooly" or indistinct term, HP says that "application modernization" using the HP ALM 11 role-based system is the means that organizations should be using to gain control over complex processes and support the transformation of their apps portfolio for today's accelerated high-volume transactions and HPC environments.

The company says that HP ALM 11 integrates with major development tools, automates workflow processes within and across applications teams, and enforces best practice application lifecycle processes such as:

• Project planning and tracking processes — to establish release criteria and manages milestones throughout the app development process based on real-time visibility into release progress and readiness.
• Three-way traceability between requirements, development, and quality artifacts for team-wide analysis and execution of application changes.
• Flexible methodology support to optimize delivery approach by project type — waterfall, custom, Agile etc.
• Lower enterprise risk from application failures due to functional, performance, and security defects in composite and rich internet applications.

"Organizations rely on applications to perform business-critical functions. Outdated tools, complex methodologies, and ever-progressing new technology make it difficult for IT to deliver effective applications," said Bill Veghte, executive vice president, Software and Solutions, HP. "HP's new solutions enable clients to accelerate the delivery of applications, lower application costs, and achieve business alignment without sacrificing quality."