HONG KONG, 26 November, 2008 – In this era of globalisation and economic change, organisations are facing growing pressures to use software as a competitive differentiator. To help companies address this challenge, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited (NYSE: IBM) today announced new offerings designed to lower software costs by helping business leaders and IT professionals more effectively collaborate. The new solutions enable these businesses to deliver high-quality software at a quicker pace, while meeting the evolving needs of the business. Using IBM's new Rational Quality Management Portfolio, key decision makers, such as CIOs, lawyers and financial consultants, now have a voice in the software delivery process.
Today, businesses must meet a wide array of quality assurance standards before ever releasing a product to the public. When the software that runs these products fails to meet business needs or doesn’t perform as expected -- a business lets down its customers, stakeholders, business partners, employees and ultimately their brand -- directly affecting their bottom line.
For example, if a medical company is forced to recall a large amount of defibrillator devices due to defects in the software, they are wasting valuable time, money and resources that could have been saved by ensuring the software met stringent quality standards prior to delivering it to the marketplace.
According to the Standish Group, businesses lose over US$300B* annually in software-related downtimes. Furthermore, 41 percent of IT projects fail to deliver the expected business value and return on investment (ROI).**
New Software Helps Customers Improve Workforce Collaboration, Embrace Web 2.0
At the core of IBM's Rational Quality Management Portfolio is IBM Rational Quality Manager, a new, collaborative “hub” designed to unify IT professionals with key business stakeholders within an organisation. IBM Rational Quality Manager ensures it is no longer the sole responsibility of the software developer to find bugs and deliver a high quality product to market. By ensuring all relevant members of the workforce to be in-sync and have access to data in real-time, a company can more easily make informed decisions; better assign and utilise their resources; and react quickly to changes in the marketplace at a lower cost. Based on IBM’s open, Jazz technology platform, Rational Quality Manager is able to provide this collaboration by using a Web-based centralised test management environment. IBM's open, Jazz technology platform helps Rational Quality Manager users collaborate in a Web-based centralised test management environment.
With a dynamic, Web 2.0 interface, Rational Quality Manager is helping employees within an organisation collaborate across business roles and beyond geographic boundaries. For example, a CIO can use Rational Quality Manager’s dashboard to monitor the aspects of the software delivery process that are contributing to the development of a product. As a result of having access to real-time information, the CIO can make immediate decisions that are in line with the needs of the business, and deliver a high quality product to the marketplace on time and ahead of the competition.
For instance, if a consumer electronics company has a target date for launching a new device, but just prior to the release they discover the software that runs it is bug-ridden, they lose valuable money and competitive edge by having to delay product sales. With the help of Rational Quality Manager, decision makers can be alerted earlier about potential hindrances, and ensured that IT professionals fix those defects immediately, reducing delays and the risk of lost revenue.
Also being introduced today, IBM Rational Test Lab Manager is a Web-based quality solution that helps companies reduce cost and increase energy savings by automating the testing process and ensuring an organisation is using its lab resources effectively and efficiently. Up until this point, lab testing was treated as a manual task. In fact, organisations spend nearly 40% of their time configuring machines to make them ready for testing.*** By using Rational Test Lab Manager, an organisation can save time and energy by automating these processes and reducing the amount of hardware used. As a result, customers will now have the ability to reprioritise these resources to other areas of their business.
In related news, IBM is launching several other new releases of products within its Quality Management Portfolio including: IBM Rational Application Performance Analyzer; IBM Rational Functional Tester; IBM Rational Quality Manager Express; IBM Rational Performance Tester; IBM Rational Service Tester for SOA Quality; IBM Rational Test RealTime; IBM Rational AppScan Tester Edition; IBM Rational RequisitePro; IBM Rational Measured Capability Improvement Framework Assessments; Telelogic Rhapsody TestConductor; and IBM Rational Requirements Composer which is expected later this year.
“The enhanced Rational Quality Management portfolio introduces an end-to-end solution for testing centers of excellence in Hong Kong,” said Daniel Tsang, Brand Manager, Rational Software, Software Group, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. “These new offerings provide invaluable capabilities to help customers significantly lower costs and risks in a way that no other competitor in the industry can. Based on an open and highly adaptable, web-based infrastructure, organisations can now continuously improve the results of their software investments by automating quality assurance throughout the application delivery process, and by improving collaboration across all relevant stakeholders within their organisation.”
For more information about IBM Rational's Quality Management Portfolio, visit: ibm.com/software/rational/offerings/quality.
* The Standish Group, Comparative Economic Normalisation Technology Study, CHAOS Chronicles v12.3.9, June 30, 2008.
**Dynamic Markets, 2007.
***Based on an IBM internal study of its own testing labs.
About IBM
For more information about IBM Hong Kong, go to: ibm.com/hk
For more information about IBM Rational Quality Manager, please visit: ibm.com/software/awdtools/rqm/
For more information about IBM Rational Test Lab Manager, please visit: ibm.com/software/awdtools/rtlm/