Borland goes open, but not open source

Borland continues its four-year move away from developer tools into Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with the introduction of a customer-centric strategy to transforming software delivery into a managed business process. The new approach is Open Application Lifecycle Management (Open ALM), and a new product, Gauntlet, is its first tangible result. This is an Open ALM application providing real-time visibility and software quality metrics across the entire delivery lifecycle. Borland says that their use of “Open” implies flexibility and customer choice, in the sense that customers should be able to use existing tools as part of an overall solution, and work flexibly to define, manage and measure their software delivery processes, without being tied to a particular platform. Borland defines Open ALM by the following characteristics:

• Any Process: Open ALM supports the customer’s established processes, whether waterfall, Agile, RUP or custom.
• Any Tools: Open ALM enables customers to use any combination of lifecycle tools – commercial and open-source – while providing visibility and traceability of assets and activities across them and the phases they support.
• Platform Agnostic: Open ALM supports organizations deploying applications to a broad range of platforms.
• Metrics and Measurement: You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Open ALM works to automate third-party data collection to drive cross-process software delivery metrics and measurement.

You can read the Open ALM manifesto on the Borland web site.