email article printer friendly more resources

The Art and Orchestration of ALM
Borland CTO discusses Borland's application lifecycle management strategy.
by Carolyn Wong

JavaOne, June 28, 2004

Application lifecycle management (ALM) extends development to operations management. In this interview with FTPOnline, Borland CTO Patrick Kerpan talks about how Borland's ALM strategy involves embedded integration and how the company's JavaOne announcements come into play.

	Borland CTO Patrick Kerpan spoke about tackling complex enterprise applications at JavaOne on Monday.

FTPOnline: CTO is a relatively new position for you. What are your priorities or directions in that job?

Patrick Kerpan: I've been with Borland for four years, just leaving the role of general manager of our development services group that makes the StarTeam configuration and change management system and the CaliberRM requirements management system. I was one of the people within Borland involved with identifying, acquiring, and integrating the StarBase company from which those products came. Prior to that, I spent most of my career in the world of derivatives technology for large global banks. So I came from large-scale, enterprise transaction processing systems, which clearly creates a bias toward my view of how software development is becoming like that as well.

We believe we're now entering the era of the industrialization of software development where people want to put in place factory-style processes to build, deploy, and manage their enterprise software applications. This ties into what's going on at JavaOne and the state of Java, if you look back at Java's past. In a relatively short period of time, Java's grown from a community of early adopters into an enterprise computing platform of the likes we've never really seen before. The Java tent is just so big now. Borland is focusing on application lifecycle management.

Application Lifecycle Management
FTPOnline: Borland went on a spree to fill out all the pieces of its ALM strategy. Can you define some of your goals within the ALM realm? How well-integrated are the tools? And can you discuss some of the specific components of your ALM strategy, such as requirements, modeling, optimization, profiling, and development management? How is Borland addressing them?

Patrick Kerpan: As a broad objective, you can look at it as art and orchestration or musicians and orchestration. Borland has a history of providing innovative tools for individual developers, and we have to continue doing that; there's still a lot of art here. If we're using the music metaphor, we still need to provide them with the musical instruments that allow them to be the fabulous artists they are.

That said, we are now in an era with a need for unparalleled orchestration. Some Java developers, modelers, QA people, and business analysts are part of a massive symphony, or a huge marching band, or a four-man grunge band. And we really need to help them orchestrate their work at the level that's appropriate for their group. At a high level, we want to keep the art but enable the orchestration.

When we made the acquisitions of Together and StarBase, people said, "What are you going to do?" We said "integration." To some degree, we got a ho-hum response of "oh, everyone says 'integration.'" But look at what we call "embedded integration," which is pieces of one application lifecycle capability showing up inside other applications within the application lifecycle—bits of requirements data showing up inside the modeling tool; bits of the testing tool showing up inside the requirements tool; bits of change management, requirements, and modeling showing up inside your coding tool. We call that embedded integration. That's the level of integration we make available to the Java developer today, whether on top of the JBuilder platform or on top of the Eclipse platform. In terms of where we came from, we've made tremendous strides in the last 15 months in embedded integration. We define integration as touch-point, which is what most of the industry has today: You have Tool A and from the menu of Tool A, you can launch Tool B.