This post originally appeared on First Article, a blog powered by Dell OEM Solutions. Written by Jeff Hudgins, our VP of Marketing, Jeff is responsible for product management, marketing communications and public relations.
Leading ISV and OEM vendors know that there is no logic in maintaining separate ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) environments for different application platforms because it quickly drives up administration and maintenance costs. According to Dave West’s Forrester Research article entitled, The Time Is Right For ALM 2.0+, “…as the value and importance of software delivery increases, the importance of applying business management to the discipline of software also grows.”
How do you build a trim-fit ALM discipline that’s easy to manage? It all starts in the early design and development phases with a firm understanding of the application, its dependence on ecosystem software and hardware components, and how you plan to patch the OS and update the app over its lifecycle. The latter is key to sustaining high availability, so let’s talk about that.
If you are like most ISVs, you need to monitor the health of the platform (both hardware and software), deliver OS patches, update on the fly, schedule backups and restore field deployed units. If you do these tasks manually, you are throwing money away. Be sure to work with reputable integration partners having the application management capabilities to automate the process and delivery of these functions with minimal interruption and cost. The best solutions allow you to distribute secure, authorized updates ubiquitously across mixed physical, virtual and cloud-based appliances.
The result of these efforts is powerful. You will create highly-reliable solutions that can be deployed and remotely monitored to ensure system health and uptime. And, as OS patches and application updates are needed, there is a system in place to securely and quickly deploy them worldwide. Taking this type of holistic approach to designing your solution on the front end will improve your bottom line by reducing support resources as the app matures. Better yet, if you select the right platform integration and ALM partner, you can likely reduce time-to-market and gain a competitive edge.
If you’re interested in a real world example, view this on-demand webinar recording: Solving Application Deployment Challenges to Grow Profits. Forrester Research, Inc. leads a thought-provoking discussion of how two leading platform partners combined to develop application lifecycle solutions for our customer's SIEM products.