The new release, to ship on June 17, adds new links at the user interface level between the tools, and is the first time that it is synchronizing new releases of some of its tools.
Best known for Synergy, its highly distributed change management tool, the company has been steadily building up an inventory of tools that span the rest of the development lifecycle.
Just last month, the company acquired Popkin Software for $45 million, adding an enterprise architecture and process-modeling tool that helps companies blueprint their business goals and processes to align them with IT architecture. Because the ink is still drying on the Popkin acquisition, it is not part of the current ALM release.
In addition to Synergy, the new release covers DOORS, the requirements management tool, and Tau, the UML tool. Under the new release, the tools remain separate and do not use a common repository or file system. Instead, users of one tool can call up capabilities of the other while remaining within staying within the native environment of the primary tool.
According to Bill Shaw, vice president of life cycle solutions, the goal is to provide developers a seamless flow as they work from requirements management to software design or change management, and vice versa. For instance, a Tau user could tab out to DOORS requirements while staying within the Tau environment.
The common release also provides master installation and licensing of the three products, and common user administration. Licensing will be handled through ‘tokens, floating licenses that allotted for each product. A software development organization buys a set amount of tokens for the suite, and can allocate them to specific products in the suite on demand.
The release is part of an overall strategy to gradually expand the breath and scope of the company’s life cycle offerings. In addition to Popkin, the company signed a resale agreement and made an acquisition offer for focal Point, which offers project portfolio management a method for prioritizing and allocating resources across multiple projects based on requirements, value, and cost.
Telelogic has also signed a partnership with MatrixOne, a product life cycle management vendor, which strays outside the company’s core IT focus into the management of engineered products.
With this strategy, Telelogic is following a path also blazed by IBM/Rational, Borland, and more recently, Compuware. Significantly, none of these players have successfully unified their life cycle tools, from architecture and planning to testing and execution, off a common platform.
Today, the best hope of unification is coming through the Eclipse framework, which extends only to user interface level, and Microsoft’s announced Team System, which is supposed to add the missing back end unified pipeline and repository for third parties to hook into.
Telelogic’s strategy differs in that it is relying on a mix of partnerships and acquisitions, as opposed to pure acquisition. They are one of many looking interestedly at Team System, once it finally materializes.
