Company seeks to smooth transition from development to deployment Looking to smooth the transition between application development and deployment, Borland on Friday will introduce Borland Deployment Op-Center for application lifecycle management.The infrastructure software is intended to help businesses control costs, manage change, and increase reliability in IT operations, the company said. Op-Center automates the manual processes of deployment, configuration, and control, the company said.Based on VisiBroker ORB technology, Op-Center can function in application environments such as CORBA, Java, or .Net, said Moty Aharonovitz, senior product manager for deployment solutions at Borland. The product fills the communications gap between development and deployment teams, Aharonovitz said, noting that two different groups of people perform these tasks. “People can use it to control, configure and deploy, and ensure the availability of mission-critical applications in a production environment, such as in a datacenter,” he said.Op-Center provides an XML-based, template-driven user interface to assist collaboration between development and deployment teams, Borland said. It features IT inventory management to define logical and physical associations between applications and infrastructure resources.Other features include the following: — Application infrastructure configuration management, including support for middleware, messaging, Web servers, and database servers.— Automatic failure detection, isolation, and recovery.— Configuration templates providing a mechanism to document deployment information. — SNMP-based connectivity with network and systems management products such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli.Web services are supported in Op-Center in that the product monitors the availability of Web services.Available now, Op-Center costs $4,000 per CPU for each hub component, which enables distributed control and configuration. Each agent that is deployed on the host where processes or applications are monitored also costs $4,000. Borland also will announce on Friday Version 6.0 of its Borland Enterprise Server application server, featuring support for J2EE 1.4, CORBA 2.6, and Web services. Additionally, the product offers pluggable Java Message Service support, backing for the Sonic MQ product, automatic recovery, and shipping with Tibco Enterprise.The product costs from $400 per server for the Web edition to $12,000 for the high-end AppServer Edition. Software Development