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Gartner report: Microsoft takes the lead in the Application Lifecycle Management(ALM) space

According to a recent Garner report Microsoft takes the lead in the ALM space.

By virtue of its position in the market as a provider of key platforms and development tools, Microsoft acts as an overall thought leader in the ALM market. However, this breadth and a late start in the ALM market have caused its tools often to lag other products, although it is now introducing innovations. At this point, other than IBM, Microsoft offers the broadest set of ALM functionality in the market. The company tends to deliver new releases every 18 months, but generally needs to coordinate with key platform updates and initiatives. To make up for long development cycles, the product team uses the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) to deliver "Power Tools" and other early access software bits.

Microsoft has a broad customer base going from small or midsize businesses (SMBs) up to extremely large enterprises, and its largest sites have more than 10,000 users. Unlike all of the other tools in this Magic Quadrant, Microsoft's is the only one that tightly binds its versioning system to the rest of the ALM planning tool. The single product platform delivery may create functional overlaps with other tools already in your portfolio. Microsoft supports the Visual Studio product line in 13 languages (the second highest of the tools in this Magic Quadrant) and is pushing into cloud deployment for its Team Foundation Server (TFS).

Although Microsoft is one of the only vendors to cover all aspects of the SDLC, its greatest challenge has been support for non-Microsoft development. However, the company has made good strides with support for Eclipse and the ability to extend TFS with Java code. The greatest challenge comes in how to stitch together a mixed environment with developers on non-Microsoft platforms that may have a stack that includes other SCCMs and the steps required to weave this together. TFS is a strong system; however, if your organization doesn't use .NET or other Microsoft technologies, then this will not be your ALM product of choice. As deployment platforms shift to the cloud, this isn't just a Java and .NET issue, and Microsoft will need to continue to demonstrating a long-term commitment to support diverse platform user needs.

Microsoft's products support:

  • Requirements management
  • Project management
  • Quality management
  • Defect management
  • Build management
  • Release management
  • Lab management
  • Change management
  • Task management
  • Modeling

Figure 1.Magic Quadrant for Application Life Cycle Management

Source: Gartner (June 2012)

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