Move will provide visibility into software development lifecycle MKS is adding application portfolio management to its ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) platform, with the planned release of MKS Integrity 2006.The package is being announced on Wednesday and ships in approximately two weeks.Inclusion of portfolio management enables MKS to provide management support for business transformations such as SOA, off-shoring and compliance, MKS said. The new capability, called MKS Portfolios, is connected to the MKS repository. Portfolios is built as an extension to the company’s single-system approach to ALM. “The thing that’s really new about this is it is the first time that there’s been an application portfolio management product that’s integrated into an ALM platform. This is not a bolt-on product,” said Phil Deck, MKS CEO.Portfolio management provides visibility into the software development lifecycle, generating metrics about project status and providing data on the information lifecycle. “It allows everyone who’s participating in the application lifecycle to gain visibility into their own [projects] and their team’s projects,” Deck said.With portfolio management, businesses are able to make more informed decisions about software processes, such as determining whether an application should be outsourced, said Phil Murphy, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Businesses, which have been saddled with high costs of application maintenance, are able to examine their own software processes, Murphy said. “Folks are spending 80 percent of their budget just to keep the existing apps running the way they should. It’s just too much,” Murphy said.MKS now is straddling two technology camps: source code management and application and portfolio management, Murphy said.“They’re not the same size as an IBM or a Computer Associates. We’ll have to see whether this spreads them a little thin. It’s an integrated product so it has some pluses,” said Murphy. MKS’s strategy differs from competitors such as Borland in that it has built its products to act as a single offering, rather than acquiring products and then linking them together afterward, Deck said. “The level of integration between the features is far more than you could achieve by loosely coupling acquired products,” he said.Also as part of MKS Integrity 2006, the company is unveiling MKS Deploy, offering enterprise staging and deployment capabilities. An audit trail is provided between software being deployed and where it came from. Approval processes, version control and audit trails are enabled.MKS Integrity 2006 pricing varies based on the feature set deployed and other factors. Software Development