NEW PRODUCTS
OpsHub is offering an integrated ALM analytics solution, which lets teams with disparate development tools have a single dashboard view with root cause analysis in all of their development activities. As a result, the company said, engineers can have deep understanding of the performance of their development organization while conveying business-relevant metrics to their executives.
UPDATES
Quest Software has added Apache Cassandra, an open-source NoSQL database, to its list of supported NoSQL platforms with the second beta release of Toad for Cloud Databases. Toad now supports data access and management for Amazon SimpleDB, Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, Microsoft Azure Table Services, and any ODBC-enabled relational database.
The new version of Rhodes, the cross-platform mobile app framework from Rhomobile, has the ability to recognize barcodes and to capture signatures, and it also has an embedded version of jQuery, called jQTouch. Rhodes 2.1 is open-source software available under the MIT license. The company also updated its RhoSync open-source sync server: Version 2.0 can do server data caching and incremental device update differencing via the open-source Redis key-value database.
Electric Cloud is now offering a smaller version of its build-test-deploy automation software. ElectricCommander Workgroup Edition is designed to give smaller organizations access to the same features that larger enterprise customers have access to. The software works with C++, Java and .NET environments.
ActiveVOS 8.0, the new version of the business process management software from Active Endpoints, supports the concept of pools and swimlanes, as defined by the Business Process Management Notation 2.0 language. It also supports BPMN 2.0 boundary events, can work with unstructured process designs, and provides direct access to data sources from within the ActiveVOS system without needing to service-enable them with external software.
SQL Storage Compress 5.0, an updated database utility from Red Gate, reduces the storage footprint of live SQL Server databases. The company says that the software, previously known as HyperBac Online, also improves I/O performance. This release compresses data up to 90%, lets SQL Server run compressed databases, and improves performance by up to 25%.
Intel is offering the 2011 version of its Parallel Studio suite for multicore development. The new release adds expanded threading libraries and a threading advisor to its C++ compiler, error-checking, and profiling tools. In the suite, Parallel Building Blocks adds new parallelism models, including Cilk Plus for C/C++ and Threading Building Blocks for C++. Parallel Advisor provides architects with parallelism design insight and analysis for building multicore applications. The software fully supports Microsoft’s Windows 7 Visual Studio 2010.
OraDeveloper Tools, a Delphi and Visual Studio add-in designed to simplify the Oracle database application development process, has been updated to support Visual Studio 2010. The software is from Devart, which has also updated its dbForge Fusion for MySQL tool to work with Visual Studio 2010, to back up schemas automatically, and to offer a graphical display for query performance profiles.
PEOPLE
Donna Farmer is the new managing director of the Scrum Alliance, the non-profit organization that promotes the Scrum agile framework. Farmer was the founder and CEO of TOR LLC, an executive search firm. She replaces James Cundiff, who resigned as managing director in September 2009, but stayed on in an interim capacity pending his replacement.
Jim Highsmith, one of the co-authors of the Agile Manifesto and an expert on agile project management, has joined ThoughtWorks as executive consultant and strategic advisor. Previously, Highsmith directed Cutter Consortium’s Agile Project Management Advisory Service. He is perhaps best known for his 2000 book, “Adaptive Software Development: A Collaborative Approach to Managing Complex Systems.”
