LogicLibrary adds smart controls to asset management |
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By Colleen Frye, News Writer
31 May 2005 | SearchWebServices.com |
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With the release of Logidex 3.6 with Smart Controls, LogicLibrary Inc., a provider of tools to manage and reuse software development assets, continues to carve out its space in service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance for development.
Logidex 3.6 allows users to define and manage software development lifecycle validations, processes and roles related to all software development assets. With Smart Controls, users can have an "out-of-the-box process," said Alan Himler, vice president of product management and marketing at Pittsburgh-based LogicLibrary. "You now can have something to start with to accelerate ROI."
Smart Controls can be customized, and organizations "can use as little of Smart Controls as they want," Himler said. According to the company, the actions can be automated within Logidex or mixed with a customer's external tools, workflows and other mechanisms.
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There's a large benefit to making the information organizations have more consumable
Alan Himler
Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, LogicLibrary
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The shift to SOAs is one factor driving the market for application development (AD) asset management tools like Logidex, said Liz Barnett, a vice president in the AD and infrastructure research group at Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Mass. "It's almost impossible to implement a strong services environment without a mechanism to find what you want to use," she said.
Forrester defines AD asset management tools as repositories that support enterprise reuse of development assets, which include application and data models; requirements specifications; architecture standards and document testing plans, scripts and results; and code.
Himler uses the analogy of a card catalog at the library. "Logidex can look in the catalog, figure out where the book is located, [and] point you to the page in the book. There's a large benefit to making the information organizations have more consumable."
However, according to Barnett's recent report on AD asset management tools, more than two-thirds of firms investing in reuse initiatives had not purchased a tool, but are using homegrown repositories. "The homegrown stuff was built for a different context; some even came out of Y2K work inventorying assets," Barnett said.
But what homegrown solutions lack, she said, is the ability to search and retrieve assets in context, as well as the ability to measure the value of reuse. "What's important in these [AD asset management] products is being able to measure value. I reused this thing, but is that important to the business? Am I reusing the right thing?"
Still, AD asset management is a nascent and what Barnett terms a "fungible" market. Revenues from this market reached nearly $30 million in 2004, up from about $14 million in 2003, according to Forrester, and Barnett said the market could exceed $100 million by 2006.
But fast growth is typical in a young market, she said, as is consolidation. "There is so much [merger and acquisition] in the development tool space in general. The discrete capability [of AD asset management] is becoming increasing necessary, but it's not enough. It's got to fit into [a] broader world."
Buyers of AD asset management tools shouldn't view this possibility as a detriment, though, Barnett said, and tighter integration with a dominant development tools vendor could benefit customers even more. "[The AD asset management tool] is usually not managing production data, it's not a primary store; it's value-added service to the development environment."
According to Forrester, the leading vendors of AD asset management tools include: LogicLibrary; Flashline Inc., Cleveland; OSTnet OpenSource Technologies Inc., Montreal; Select Business Solutions Inc., Boulder, Colo.; CollabNet Inc., Brisbane, Calif.; and VA Software Corp., Fremont, Calif.
In addition to Smart Controls, LogicLibrary's Logidex 3.6 now supports integration with Borland Software Corp.'s JBuilder. Other integrated development environments supported include Eclipse; IBM WebSphere Studio; IBM Rational's Application Developer, Software Modeler and Software Architect; Microsoft Visual Studio .NET; and SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio.
Also new is integration with Logicscan, the company's product for automating application security analysis; additional integration with the IBM Rational Software Development Platform via the Reusable Asset Specification; and support for Mozilla's Firefox browser.
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