Marketplace changes and technological innovations are driving the need for accelerated software delivery. However, today, most organizations have software supply chains that are larger and more diverse than ever before, integrating a web of third-party applications, in-house software development tools, legacy systems and products from multiple vendors. Managing this complexity has become the defining challenge for today’s IT organization. Business priorities are often poorly aligned with software capabilities distributed across multiple tools, repositories, and teams. What’s more, the sheer complexity of managing the extended software supply chain—including an increasing number of stakeholders—can stifle innovation. The defining challange is stepping up from individual application management to a multi-vendor Application Lifecycle Management approach. Although ALM has helped improve the quality of applications deployed to production, failures still occur. For most organizations, the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) stack has become so diverse and disconnected that the traceability and cross-stakeholder collaboration limitations have become a substantial bottleneck for software delivery. In this session, you´ll be exposed to a new Rational multi-vendor ALM solution that aims to alleviate this by providing open specifications for diverse systems to communicate and support integrated scenarios, enabling better connectivity between business needs and IT deliverables!

Building business and IT architectures encompass business strategy, capabilities, information systems and technology. How can CIOs and key decision makers gain better insights and make informed decisions over their investments? Assessing and prioritizing business & IT investments, evaluating architectures across your organization to identify opportunities, gaps and redundancies is one approach. Most organizations also spend 70-90 percent of funds on keeping lights on, making it difficult to fund projects needed to grow and transform the business. Application Portfolio Management (APM) aims at analyzing your operational application portfolio to identify initiatives that will reduce the cost and improve the business agility of that portfolio. This session will also discuss an APM approach, including criteria that can be used to determine how to rationalize and modernize a portfolio of applications. Hear what other organizations have accomplished by adopting Smarter Business Planning and Transformation today!

In the recent ASEAN IDC IT Transformation Survey, improving application performance and end-to-end testing were the top 2 issues organizations faced in their drive to continuously improve their IT systems. Time-to-market pressures, building new service-oriented architectures, complying with regulatory requirements, and working with geographically distributed teams add additional complexities without compromising quality can often derail software testing projects that aren’t ready for these challenges. To meet these challenges, successful IT organizations are taking a strategic approach to Quality Assurance, applying the practices of business governance to achieve a competitive advantage through better software. In addition, technologies such as virtualization and the cloud enables continuous integration testing much earlier in the development cycle. Whether you are planning to build expertise in your IT organization, or looking for partners with testing expertise, IBM Rational Quality Management solutions and best practices can provide you with the framework and tools needed to expedite software testing by optimizing test environment set up, streamlining continuous integration and testing & providing 24x7 testing capabilities to virtualize heterogeneous hardware, software and services.

Cloud computing is no longer the hottest buzzword; that distinction likely belongs to "DevOps." DevOps is part movement, part religion, part architecture, and part process. However you view it, it is clear that DevOps has the potential enable fundamental changes in the relationship between development and operations teams, just as businesses are demanding that IT organizations do more with less. Applications development teams often think a release is a specific version of an application that is ready for deployment but the business doesn’t think in these terms, however. To the business, a release is a set of new capabilities that may improve operations, reduce costs or help drive new business. In reality, a release may span many new systems, include both hardware and software, and require infrastructure upgrades. This difference in perception is at the root of many problems faced by businesses trying to bridge the gaps between Dev and Ops. DevOps requires a holistic view of the entire Application Lifecycle from requirements through to release, management, and maintenance -- and back to requirements. This session explains how cloud technologies enable integrated processes, and practices that dramatically improve software quality, reduce risk, and improve time-to-market. Explore new strategies for automating application handoffs through a pipeline from development through test to production, while improving collaboration across the software development and deployment lifecycle and see how software delivery can be accelerated at unprecedented speed!