In the past six months, there have been a number of announcements from both start-up and incumbent vendors announcing support of “Agile” software development.  On June 4th, the wave of Agile will spash as IBM releases its Jazz platform and Rational Team Concert.  It’s great to see IBM jump into the space and validate the value of collaborative, Agile development models.  It also signals that traditional models of application lifecycle management using bloated, waterfall-phase-specific tools that only integrate through import/export are finally nearing their end.

Now, the Agile software development pool is looking like a fun place to play. At Rally, we are thrilled because IBM’s entrance signals that the Agile waters are fine - even for the most pragmatic organizations.  This signal also comes at time when real proof of the benefits of Agile are coming out in the form of solid benchmark studies from folks like QSM Associates.

Given that signal and growing proof points, companies now have some real thinking to do. 

The first question is, How fast and how far am I going to go with Agile in my organization?

The second question is, Who am I going to partner with to increase my speed and likelihood of success?

With regard to the first question, how fast and far you go with Agile should be driven by your marketplace and current performance.  In most organizations, Agile is not the driver of change, but more and more the only clear enabler to meet rising customer expectations and market pressures.  In the last five years, the industry has figured out how to adopt and scale Agile development beyond single teams and single team tools, and there are some really solid guides coming out on how to adopt and scale Agile in existing organizations. (Flow-Pull-Innovate Discussion, Scaling Software Agility Book and Blog, Project Managers Bridge to Agile - Book)

If you want to try to go further and faster than your competitors, you are going to have to spend resources on partners who can provide you with the whole solution of education, training, coaching, professional services, integrations and multi-team and multi-program applications for managing a large number of smaller and faster moving teams.

That brings us to the second question, who is going to be your partner?  I would like to make the case that today Rally is the best partner in the Agile pool.  We are the Agile lifecycle market leader, and we have the on-demand SaaS platform and the collaborative, service-orientation to ensure your success.

Agile leadership over past four years and accelerating
After four years and 28 releases of Rally's Agile lifecycle management solutions, we have the most robust and mature set of solutions for organizations that want to integrate and scale software agility beyond a single team.  In comparison, IBM’s entry is strong in the collaborative development, build and task management workflow, but extremely weak in Agile planning, test management and larger, project workflow integration. The IBM offering really comes into the market validating Agile, but focuses on Microsoft, Collabnet, Atlassian and open source collaborative development workflow tools.

By focusing one layer above this workflow and enabling Web 2.0 integrations within this layer, Rally plays well with any of the collaborative development workflow environments.  We don’t have the legacy of the old, role-specific tools and their brittle integrations to drag along into this new world.

On-demand platform for overall software lifecycle management
Given the tight integrations to source control and build tools, collaborative tools like Jazz are mostly installed behind the firewall.   While being behind the firewall provides security over your source code, it comes with a high cost of installation, maintenance, upgrade and hardware.   In contrast, Rally’s approach of putting collaboration in the project management layer hosts perfectly in the internet and delivers a broader project perspective while saving the materials, energy and IT maintenance of 1-3 servers per installation.

At Rally, we deliver the Agile project and program coordination applications in an incrementally scaled, on-demand and subscription model, which is perfectly aligned with the best practice of incremental rollout of Agile. We have proven that success comes from scaling Agile in incremental steps that deliver rapid ROI, reduce risk, increase throughput and bridge existing technology infrastructures.    The benefit of an on-demand model extends into our product to let teams start for free with a 10-user Community Edition and add-on configurable modules to extend beyond a single team and up into the extended enterprise.

 
Collaborative partner for success
At Rally, we understand there is no silver bullet for Agile success.   To align with our incremental and on-demand approach, we provide a collaborative environment and resources to help you before and after your adoption of Agile begins.  Agile Commons provides a community of support and open content for use in education and evaluation of Agile applications, services and best practices. 

Rally's whole model of customer engagement of agile in an incremental, on-demand and collaborative fashion has us scaling rapidly as the pool water are rising.  We have demonstrated its value to software vendors, internet service vendors and IT organizations over the past four years.  We are well prepared for the party, and hope you will join us for fun and success.