IBM Engineering Lifecycle Manager

In November, 2012 the IBM corporation announced the new software intended for the help to the organizations in creation, development and delivery of reasonable products, systems and applications. New software simplifies and accelerates process of creation of products at all its stages, reduces costs and helps the companies to solve the problems connected with observance of regulatory requirements and standards.

Devices and systems which the person uses every day – from cars to surgical robots – become harder and harder and intellectual, including as a result of application in them the advanced software. For the companies which create reasonable products the growing volume of functional interactions between the software and mechanical and electric components significantly increased complexity of development and delivery of new solutions.

With new software of IBM Engineering Lifecycle Manager engineers will gain a complete impression of the project for the best understanding of hundreds of thousands of difficult interactions. This product gives search capabilities, a request, viewing and the analysis of influence for many engineering disciplines. More complete display of the project will help the companies to make more reasoned decisions in questions of development due to determination of the potential conflicts and changeable factors which can delay development process and lead to increases in expenses.

"The recipe of success is simple. The companies need to bring the innovation products to the market, being ahead of competitors on terms of development and cost, – Christoph Kekner, the general manager of IBM Rational noted. – New offers of IBM help the organizations to depart from excessively difficult development process traditional for the last 10 years, to integrate engineering disciplines and to look at an overall picture – for development, testing and delivery of the best solutions".

In all spheres of human activity implementation of programs in products and systems considerably expands their opportunities. Developers need to go in step with these changes that is difficult.

So, for example, the onboard software of the modern car contains from 5 million to 15 million source code lines, integrated with thousands of mechanical and electric components. At making changes in the program which manages automatic equipment of the brake system of the car the development team needs to estimate the impact of these changes on other parts of a program code and other systems.

Without new software of IBM search of answers to such questions, as: whether "the brake system will still function properly" and "will cause these changes exceeding of the project budget", can take several months because of data collection manually from external sources. Using new software of IBM engineers can make and execute requests and quickly define and analyze dependences between thousands of systems and features of the code of applications.

Misunderstanding of these dependences and interrelations can yield serious losses. By estimates, only in the USA because of errors of system engineering of the company lose more than 22 billion dollars. If to consider the becoming tougher regulatory requirements in many industries, then risks increase. One case of mismatch to requirements for the company with turnover leads more than 1 billion dollars to 81 million dollars of additional expenses.

Need of continuous delivery

As mobile applications, devices and systems become harder and harder and intellectual, the market demand for personalisation, release of modifications according to requirements of customers and frequent updates of models and versions sharply increased. Supply capability to the market the high-quality software is more regular, quicker and more effectively is now decisive factor achievements of competitive advantage. According to the future research IBM Institute for Business Value, 54% of the polled companies consider software development a crucial condition of gaining competitive advantage, but only 25% of respondents said that they can use the software for obtaining competitive advantage already today.

To help the companies to release the innovation software products quickly and effectively, IBM also provided IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery. This new offer is designed to assist developers in the solution of the main problems interfering fast and cost-efficient delivery of software, providing timely access to a feedback with clients, permanent interaction with business divisions and capability to automate key processes.

IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery helps the companies to reduce a cycle of release of the software in the way:

• Reductions of a time frame from creation of a program code before application deployment from days to one minutes due to automation, standardization and use of the repeated processes.
• Simplifications of interaction on the scale of the organization using joint plans of projects, the general workflows and tasks for creation of a program code, testing and deployment of applications.
• Automatic change tracking in projects – in particular, in a program code and settings of applications – and accomplishment of pipeline tasks, when necessary.
• The help in support of growth of business through almost instant deployment of hundreds of virtual machines for ensuring compliance to the growing requirements of development processes, testings or productions.
• Reductions of time of development and reduction of complexity thanks to providing a program code for the repeated processes.