Have you heard CA Technologies acquired Rally Software with a price tag around $480 million? The news is great for those with CA PPM, looking to cement project management software with their agile methodologies.
Rally, formed in 2001, already serves the enterprise systems of 35 of the Fortune 100, apparently accelerating innovation and improving performance by “disrupting established business models,” said Mike Gregoire, CEO of CA.
CA has been working with Rally for just over four years—both Boards of Directors unanimously approved the merger—and CA believes the acquisition will strengthen their DevOps and Management Cloud. “This deal is about enabling speed and flexibility, about how we can make the most demanding enterprises truly agile,” said Gregoire.
While Rego has an integration that passes important data between Rally and CA PPM—making it easier to track agile projects—Rego Consulting’s president, Dan Greer, is looking forward to hearing more about CA’s integration plans.
“We would expect as Rally becomes a proper part of CA, a more robust and wider scope integration would come about,” said Jason Soulier, VP of Business Development and Marketing at Rego.
CA PPM is “really our strategic foothold in IT,” said James Harvey, Senior Vice President of CA’s IT Business Management Division. He explained that while CA PPM allows you to set up and monitor your IT strategy, Rally can be used to build-out strategic, agile applications.
Industry analyst firms, like Forrester, note the importance of the agile trend. In one agile survey by Forrester, over 60% of 560 decision-
makers reported interest, implementation plans, or experience with the Agile methodology, both for custom development and packaged software.
While the CA PPM to Rally integration details are hammered out, we remain impressed by CA’s development this year and their recent release of CA PPM 14.2. “This takes a huge step forward,” says Dan Greer because it’s easier to get information into the system and export it quickly for reporting.
You’re probably aware that one of the difficulties with earlier releases of CA PPM, known formerly as “CA Clarity PPM,” was inputting and extracting data quickly.
“The new release offers built-in data warehouse and business intelligence capabilities that managers can use to perform multidimensional and trending analysis on PPM data. It’s also possible to pull in data from other sources to augment the PPM data,” said Rick Whiting, Senior Editor with The Channel Company.
Rally’s mission is to accelerate innovation, improve performance, and respond effectively to market evolution by aligning software development and strategic business objectives, facilitating collaboration, and increasing transparency.
That sounds right up Rego Consulting’s alley.
Are you interested in agile development or planning to use Rally to augment your CA PPM decision-making? Tell us about it in the comments.
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About the Author: Rego Consulting
