ROI Tools and Methodology Help Siemens Demonstrate Benefits of Unified Communications Solutions

After engaging with Glomark-Governan in 2001 to implement the practice of presenting IT Value to its prospective customers, Siemens Communications, Inc. has chosen to renew its contract with Glomark-Governan to leverage its solution to help demonstrate the value of Siemens’ unified communications products and services to customers.

“Siemens’ desire to re-license Genius® software demonstrates their continued confidence in our products and EVC™ Methodology,” said Todd Whittier, U.S. Regional Director of Glomark-Governan. “Their commitment to the collaborative development of a Business Case with their clients has been leveraged as a competitive differentiator. They rise above the typical “just another vendor” role, and are viewed as true business partners by their clients,” said Whittier.

Siemens has adopted the practice of Glomark-Governan’s EVC Methodology and the usage of the Glomark-Governan Genius tools to highlight the tangible and intangible benefits and value of unified communications to prospective and current customers. With these tools, Siemens’ sales force can build a business case for customers, which quantifies the total cost of ownership and the return on investment of Siemens’ unified communications solutions.

“Using the Business Case Builder (BCB), which is how we have branded the Glomark-Governan ROI tool, has given our sales force a distinct methodology and a unique customer deliverable to help articulate the value of Siemens’ unified communications solutions,” said Alina Urdaneta, Vice President of Marketing, North America, for Siemens Communications, Inc. “This has helped us show customers that Siemens can deliver significant efficiencies and cost savings through the deployment of software-based VoIP, for example. With the BCB, Siemens’ sellers can quantify improved productivity realized through solutions like presence and collaboration applications, high definition video, one-number service and mobility tools. More importantly, the BCB is a vehicle for Siemens’ sellers to better understand their customers’ business objectives, and build intimacy and loyalty among their customer base.”

About Glomark-Governan
Glomark-Governan helps enterprises around the world by providing them with the methodology, training, consulting, benchmarking research, and software tools necessary to assess, communicate and measure the economic value of investments in technology and services initiatives. Glomark-Governan has enhanced and refined its Economic Value Creation (EVC™) Methodology for more than a decade, bringing to market a proven, complete solution that allows companies to justify their solutions’ value, define operational and performance metrics, assess economic risk, and quickly create project-specific business cases.


source:- pr-canada.net/

Borland Seeks To Unify Software Development Information, Management

"We want to transform software delivery, which doesn't have the best track record, into a managed business process. ... This is aFedEx (NYSE: FDX) tracking system for IT projects," said Rick Jackson, senior VP of corporate strategy from what is now Borland's Austin, Texas, headquarters. In other words, Borland claims it can make the heretofore inscrutable software development process measureable and able to be monitored. Borland is launching a framework for placing management tools on top of the software development process. The idea is to provide visibility for the business stakeholders, developers, project managers, and software executives into the development process.

The announcement of Borland Management Solutions raises the stakes for the former Santa Cruz, Calif., development tools company. It's left its Delphi and Turbo Pascal days behind; it's not yet clear how well its development expertise translates into a new management layer over the sometimes-cantankerous code construction process.

Its framework will sit atop a development team's preferred tools and over Borland's own existing application life-cycle management products, such as its Caliber requirements management tool or Together visual modeling tools. It also will add the following:

-- TeamDemand, the business stakeholders view into how work is progressing on the application sought by his business unit.

-- TeamFocus, a high-level project management system that support different development methodologies, including modern Agile methods, traditional waterfall development, or a rapid, iterative development approach.

-- TeamAnalysis, a business intelligence tool sitting atop development tools and application lifecycle management products to glean an overall picture from interrelated teams, discover trend lines, and project finish dates.

All three are scheduled to become available in the fall with pricing to be determined.

The management tools have already been deployed at several large customer sites and internally in Borland's own development process. Chuck Maples, Borland's VP of application development, said he used to assess projects for top management by interrupting the work of each team and demanding a set of statistics from them indicating their progress. It would take him two weeks to collect the information. By the time he presented his summary to top management, the data was out of date.

"This system replaces two weeks of work, where I would do a mini-operations review to get ready for the operations review," he said in an interview. Most of his interactions with his project managers and team leaders were to get a fix on where the process stood, not whether the goals were the right ones or the team's understanding of the business was correct.

The framework will be able to leverage data collected by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Project, Borland Caliber, Borland StarTeam change and configuration management system, Borland Silk Central Test Manager and HP (NYSE: HPQ) Quality Center and assemble it in a single repository as it emerges this fall. TeamDemand, TeamFocus, and TeamAnalysis will all share the information in the repository.

Jackson said Borland plans to expand the tools covered by the framework beyond the initial set "to major market tools," such as IBM (NYSE: IBM) Rational RequisitePro requirements manager, IBM Rational ClearCase change management, Telelogic's Doors (a requirements management tool now owned by IBM), and other standard bearers in the marketplace. The scope may be sweeping, but the Borland executives could not at this point put a timeframe on when other elements of the extensive Rational toolset or products in Microsoft's Visual Studio toolset might get included.

"We are working with several third parties who will produce connectors" between tools that Borland can't get to itself, or build connectors to the custom tools used in-house that enterprise managers will want to tie into a management platform, Jackson said.

The management interface to the three new management tools produces dashboards and project summaries with many graphical elements.

Maples illustrated a Agile development method chart that tells him how many user stories (software use cases in more traditional development lingo) are associated with a sprint, or a three- to four-week period of a project. The chart showed use cases completed versus those still to go. Another chart showed how much of the code had been tested, what the defect rate was, and how many defects remained to be resolved. Such data takes some of the guesswork out of projecting how a development process is progressing and when it might be completed.

source:- informationweek.com/

UK IT salaries on the rise

Permanent IT salaries in the UK have risen by 4.1 per cent over the past 12 months, according to research released this week.

A comprehensive study by IT recruitment specialist CV Screen monitored over 11,000 advertised positions in the UK during the first quarter of 2008.

The survey found that the average advertised salary for an IT professional in the UK is now £34,217.

"The high demand for IT professionals has continued to put upward pressure on IT salaries," said CV Screen director Matthew Iveson.

"There are certain technical skills where there is still a considerable war for talent. Candidates with strong skills in areas such as .Net, C# and PHP are inundated with opportunities."

Iveson added that the IT jobs market is holding up well with regards to the outlook for salaries in 2008, in spite of the wider economic problems.

"The rising costs of living in the UK will see more candidates seeking to move for financial reasons, thus putting further upward pressure on IT salaries, " he said।

source = http://www.vnunet.com/