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In search of a change management system (Part III): The Application View

November 14th, 2006

One of the most puzzling aspects of the set of companies we found in Part II: IBM Rational, Sunview Software, Seapine, BMC, Pega, Solidcore, Opsware, MetricsStream, is several companies with development tools. Infact if you dig a bit deeper other companies who sold tools in the developer market — most notably Mercury Interactive (now HP) also seem to offer change management.

One explanation which comes to mind seems to be, that for a long time software developers have used source code management systems, which had versioning tools like CVS or SVN would naturally extend their value proposition to change management.

If you look at the vendors out there, it seems that there are two different directions people are coming after change management … one is starting at the Application layer and the other is starting at the system layer. The following picture from Mercury Interactive’s web site provides a similar layering.

If you approach this from the application side, then the change cycle starts with a developer making some changes in response to a request by the busines unit. These changes are tested in staging and then put together in a release which is put into production. All of which fits neatly into ITIL Change Management/Release Management world. Mercury fits this point of view very well.
The next set of tools which view change management from the perspective of the application are the “application dependency mapping” folks. I guess they originated from the problem that companies face when putting things in production … changes interact with each other. Especially if you are in the Java world, there are a lot of files, classes, settings etc, which depend on each other. So knowing the dependency between one application and another and also having a preview as to what are all the things one change can effect seems valuable. Most of the major players in this space have been gobbled up by larger companies: Relicore (Symantec), Collation (IBM), nLayers (EMC), Cendura (CA), Appilog (Mercury).

It seems like most of the above companies discover the applications by doing a scan and then figure out the dependencies between them also. The scanning gives people the ability to determine what has changed.

I guess the application view has its benefits in the sense that it sits closer to the business user and the business use. The other companies which came up on google for change management start more at the systems layer … next next next.

Entry Filed under: Change Control