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On 17 July 2001, Borland announced TeamSource DSP, a collaborative development platform for distributed teams to deliver global e-business applications. TeamSource will feature a hosted infrastructure, source code management and business messaging. Borland expects to announce general availability and pricing of TeamSource by the end of 3Q01.
To build competitive e-business products, AD organizations must participate across geographic, functional and corporate boundaries. They must also adjust to the software development life cycle becoming more complex, communication becoming more imperative and project management becoming increasingly difficult. An emerging market can help AD organizations address these challenges; Gartner calls it the HDS market.
These services consist of installations of AD tools and infrastructure hosted and maintained by external service providers. HDS provides a wrapper for tools or products, infrastructure and operations, while relieving AD organizations of the responsibility of building and administering this overhead. As another benefit, HDS provides a truly portable environment that may be replicated and moved between projects.
Borland TeamSource is a new product designed specifically for a hosted environment. As with all hosted services, the TeamSource offering may be updated more regularly and installation presents no problem. Vendors such as Merant and Rational Software offer similar competitive platforms. In the area of load testing, vendors such as Compuware, Empirix, Mercury Interactive and Segue Software offer hosted development services.
Borland's initial HDS offering, TeamSource, delivers three components:
- The core service provides the data center aspect or infrastructure, and the operations portion. By having the infrastructure and operations hosted, distributed development teams can focus on the task of creating e-business applications and products without the concern of overhead.
- The code service provides the basics of software configuration management in a hosted environment.
- The collaborative service extends instant messaging to enable communications among the entire team, regardless of geographic location.
Hosted development can reduce capital costs, rapidly deliver more-consistent implementations of sophisticated development environments and overcome some of the challenges of building distributed development capacities. Enterprises deploying new tools, those with limited capital budgets and those seeking the advantages of a central hosting or central administration environment should consider TeamSource and similar HDS offerings as a new alternative source for AD tools.
Analytical Source: Theresa Lanowitz, Applications Development & Maintenance
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