CAST, a world leader in software analysis and measurement, today announced CAST Highlight, the industry’s first comprehensive, cloud-based SaaS solution that very rapidly provides IT leaders with a snapshot of any or all the company’s applications.  CAST Highlight reads through software within seconds, without the need to upload code to the cloud, and automatically provides feedback on software health – arming executives with the information to determine which applications need further investigation or closer ongoing monitoring for structural issues.

“Software outages are on the rise, IT maintenance costs are out of control, and yet CIOs are ‘flying blind’ when it comes to the applications that comprise their systems because they don’t know much about the software structure and cannot see the potential risks embedded within them,” said Lev Lesokhin, CAST Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. “This is a fast snapshot of an enterprise’s systems that provides IT managers with insight into the complexity, the technical debt and potential risk within their applications.”

CAST Highlight combines the science, R&D and software purchased from a sole source provider to the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS), the parent company of Airbus, with CAST’s 20 years of experience analyzing application software for many large corporations around world. CAST’s flagship product, the Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) provides the highly granular analysis and measurement capability that would naturally follow for the most risky applications identified by Highlight.
    
Starting from the Highlight portal, users download a software scanner to their systems, and point it at the locations for any or all application software they wish to analyze. The analyzer conducts the assessment locally and creates a text file to upload back to the cloud portal where project managers and CIOs can examine analytics regarding size and quality. The whole process takes minutes per application. A large enterprise can do an application portfolio management sweep in a one-week time frame – something that traditionally entails a 6 to 12 month project.

CAST Highlight is available on June 1, 2011.  Pricing is available upon request.  For more information, visit http://www.castsoftware.com/Highlight.