CM Goals: Eliminating costs of multiple tools

If your Configuration Management or Product Management solution involves the use of multiple management tools, you're paying more than once for the benefit of having to maintain multiple tools. Your success depends on maintaining the required level of expertise for each of the tools and for each of the integration areas. Neuma's CM+ provides a way to support all of your product management processes, probably for less than you're paying for any one of your current tools.

Did you ever have a problem in your 'integrated' management environment where the various tool vendors all claimed it was someone else's problem? Even if they all came in to look at it, odds are you would be charged by those vendors who found their portion of the solution was cleared. Perhaps the problem was in the in-house integration logic. Whatever the case, can you afford the time it takes to coordinate multiple vendors to assess the problem? Neuma's CM+ is an integrated solution - a single tool providing a suite of management applications which you can easily extend to meet your needs. Got a problem? We're with you. We focus on making our customers happy because that's how we grow. We want to hear about and fix your problems quickly so that other customers don't experience them. Apart from the administrative headaches you'll avoid through single point licensing, maintenance, billing, training and consulting contacts, you'll find a single integrated solution refreshing - one that will give you peace of mind.

Some people think that by buying all of their tools from the same vendor, whether a re-seller or a manufacturer, they'll reduce their overall solution costs. And this is true to some extent, if you're willing to live with a pre-packaged configuration which only partially meets your needs and supports your terminology. CM+ is a single fully-customizable tool supporting all of your management applications, not a set of integrated tools. Even tools from the same vendor, with similar naming conventions (e.g. ClearCase and ClearQuest), can soak up development resources as you try to configure them to work together. You need an in-house group just to maintain the glue that's holding the tools together. In the end, to keep the size of your tool integration team down, you compromize on the level of integration or you start looking for the all-encompassing industry standard at the end of the rainbow, only to find that it's a least common denominator solution. Free up your resources. CM+ is fully integrated - out of the box! And it is easy to customize and extend the application set while preserving the unprecedented level of integration, without an in-house glue generating department.

What are the odds that the planets all line up? About the same as the probability that your multiple vendors will come out with compatible upgrades during the same time frame. You may find two or three line up, but you're always waiting for the weakest link to catch up before you can take advantage of the upgrades. And then when you do, you've got to line up your internal resources to adjust the glue based on the new features set and phased out set of features on which your integration relied. Perhaps you have to let go of a few of your previous integration capabilities because of new features in the various tools, or in how they can communicate together or with your in-house glue. CM+ is a single point release. You choose the timing. Upgrade some or all of your clients when you choose. Old functionality remains, new functionality is available. Don't treat your migraines, get rid of them!

Whether it's reliability, disaster recovery, integration, upgrades, data flow, workflow, training, roll-out, support or otherwise, your product managment solution is going to be limited in capability by the weakest link(s) in your vendor chain. The greater the number of vendors, the greater the probability that the weaknesses will surface. Choose a proven solution from a single vendor, Neuma. Even conglomerates merging together several tools will have multiple departments dealing with each tool. Neuma provides the only truly integrated Configuration Management and Product Management environment. Only Neuma reduces the number of links in your management tool chain to one.

Your putting together your plans for development management tools. You go through several costly and time consuming evaluations, numerous purchasing and contract negotiations, plenty of legal and administrative costs. Evaluations alone require identifying qualified tools, installing (and uninstalling) them, training on them so that you can evaluate them, identifying and perhaps prototyping the integration capabilities among them. In short, it's a lot of work and money, unless you look at Neuma first. Neuma's CM+ capabilities will allow you to short cut your evaluations, and will minimize purchasing, legal and administrative costs, because you only have to deal with one vendor. And we'll make that experience as painless as possible with functionality, capabilities and options which meet your requirements. Experience the freedom of CM+.

What is integration? Many well-seasoned professionals believe they have put together an impressive set of tools that work together; however, they've probably done two things: (1) Left behind a trail of integration glue developed at a significant cost, that needs to be maintained and customized over time; and (2) lowered their sights on the original level of integration goals. The problem with glue integration is that the tools were not designed to work together. And even where there are standards to help reduce integration costs, the level of the standard often bows to the least common denominator when evaluating requirements. Neuma's CM+ was built from the ground up to be a single, truly integrated solution. As such, there is no glue - the STS engine understands integration and allows CM+ to provide unprecedented levels of integration to its users. So much so, that our users don't even see the boundaries between applications - they see a single, easy-to-use, integrated communications tools with advanced data management, reporting, and reliability capabilities. They see a configurable environment which both documents and supports their development processes, to their company standards and terminology. The don't see Glue. They don't see restrictions on the types and speed of data access between applications. Find out what Neuma means by True Integration.

You've got a single tool that integrates version control and problem tracking. Perhaps you've noticed that your training requirements for end-users and administrators alike are lower. Now imagine having a single tool for all of your product management needs: requirements tracking, document management, version and change control, problem tracking, test suite management, project and activity management, workflow management, reporting, build and release tracking and perhaps more. A single tool means less training. Users learn the tool once and then learn your own corporate processes. In fact, CM+ provides support for your processes, whether from the perspective of user interface, data, roles, workflow descriptions, rules and triggers or quality certification perspectives. It makes it much easier for your employees to learn your in-house processes as they simply continue to use a familiar tool to address the roles assigned to them. An easy-to-use tool means less training. A consistent workflow definition means less training, fewer courses, less cost. Let Neuma show you how to minimize one of the most cost-intensive activities of acquiring a new tool - training. We'll also show you how you can introduce new applications over time, rather than acquiring new tools, and with very little training.

Multiple tools typically mean multiple applications running on your desktop, multiple user interfaces to switch between, the need for bigger screens. A messy desktop is less productive, it requires you to think about your action before you pick your application window. With CM+, your applications are integrated in a single environment. The object-oriented user interface allows you to click on the item or items you're dealing with and select the appropriate operation. The role-based configuration ability allows you to see only the actions specific to your roles - and you may easily customize this.

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