Why Agile Business Suite Should Be Your Development Environment

Transcription

1 EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW Why Agile Business Suite Should Be Your Development Environment

2 Welcome to the Application Era Development Takes Center Stage At a time when businesses define themselves by their applications, development has taken on a much more prominent and visible role than it s ever had before. Organizations increasingly realize the value their developers can deliver, and are repeatedly turning to these teams to drive differentiation and competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded, dynamic marketplace. But with this new position of prominence comes greater expectations: to become better, more collaborative partners to the business, align with its strategic initiatives, and change as these goals evolve. The market s moving fast, with opportunities coming and going overnight, so keeping pace with shifting demands is vital. With Unisys Agile Business Suite (AB Suite ), you ll have the development environment you need to deliver innovative functionality with the speed required to meet rapidly changing business and consumer expectations. AB Suite: Modern Development Delivered With the flexible, innovative, model-driven development environment in AB Suite, you ll be able to quickly build and release enterprise-class applications designed to capitalize on shifting business and IT expectations. With it, you can collaborate with your peers and define solutions in high-level business terms, so everyone can focus on what the application should do not how it should be coded. And, when requirements inevitably change, you ll be able to address them with precision and certainty. This way, you ll greatly improve business agility and responsiveness. Your team will become a better partner to the organization it supports. And you ll help to make sure your applications drive differentiation well into the future. Need more reasons why AB Suite is right for you and your team? Consider the following 2

3 Your Apps, But Better You ll Get More Out of Your Existing Investments Your applications encompass years of careful thought, effort, and execution. They re critical to your competitive position and because of this, rebuilding them can cost you considerable time and resources. But if you re a Unisys Enterprise Application Environment (EAE) shop, you can move your current application portfolio to AB Suite without any rewriting or rebuilding. You ll upgrade to a more productive, more powerful, and more flexible development environment, while maintaining the value and business logic you ve worked so hard to create. In addition to preserving your existing business functionality, you ll be able to reuse your application assets in new ways, helping you get even more value from what s already in place. This way, you ll bring your core applications in line with the latest development standards and techniques and take advantage of a wealth of new possibilities in a safe, low-risk manner. You ll Enhance Security, Availability, and Performance The ability to protect sensitive data, remain accessible at all times, and operate at peak performance are no longer luxuries they re expectations your applications have to meet to help you succeed. With AB Suite running in the ClearPath MCP operating environment, you ll be able to deliver the high levels of security, availability, and performance the market and your business demands. No matter if you re new to MCP or an EAE shop that s used it for years, you ll develop applications in an environment with no record of user data breaches. And with rapid updates not to mention exceptional reliability you won t have to worry about downtime affecting the availability of your critical applications. Furthermore, because the MCP environment handles high transaction volumes with ease and offers the freedom to tap into additional processing power as needed you ll feel confident that your applications can continually deliver the performance your business and its customers expect. 3

4 Enterprise-Class Databases, Faster Development You ll Extend Your Database Environment As your application portfolio matures, it s essential that your database environment follows suit. When you run AB Suite in the ClearPath MCP operating environment, you ll have access to Enterprise Database Server for ClearPath MCP (DMSII), a high-volume, enterprise-class database management platform compatible with several application types. Since it s routinely updated with every new AB Suite release, you can take advantage of enhancements that help you minimize reorganizations while making the reorganizations you do run more scalable and efficient and improve general DMSII flexibility. Plus, with Unisys Data Exchange, you ll be able to extend DMSII data to analytics engines in real time to support business process integration, reporting, big data analytics, and business intelligence activities. With the combined power of AB Suite, DMSII, and Data Exchange, you ll have the capabilities you need in today s data-driven world. You ll Demystify DevOps DevOps promises to help you be more responsive and bring higher-quality releases to market faster by improving communication, integration, and collaboration between development and operations teams. That said, putting the concept into practice isn t always easy. But when you pair AB Suite with Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), you ll have a development environment with DevOps in its DNA. With support for key concepts like continuous integration, continuous testing, version control, automation, and continuous delivery, you ll release more solutions with greater frequency and predictability and far less risk. By releasing applications with increased regularity, your developers will receive feedback faster, creating an environment of continuous learning that helps them deliver more value to internal and external consumers alike. As a result, you ll become more responsive to change while accelerating time to market. 4

5 Setting a New Standard You ll Enable Anytime, Anywhere Access Your applications can no longer live in just one place. Rather, you have to make them accessible on and optimized for a variety of devices and channels to deliver maximum value to today s consumers. With AB Suite, you can mobile-, SOA-, and webenable your applications with ease, so they re readily available when, where, and on whichever device you choose. With the ClearPath Forward TM eportal, you can rapidly extend your applications to new channels, users, and environments without changing the applications themselves helping you realize a greater return on what you ve already built. And with the Agile Business Suite Client Framework, you ll be able to add state-of-the-art user interfaces to these solutions using your preferred development environment, giving you more control over the user experience and more opportunities to deliver satisfying results to internal and external audiences. You ll Stay Industry Standard Incorporating industry-standard tools, techniques, and processes into your development and runtime environments is critical to boosting efficiency and enabling your applications to interoperate with external solutions and services. With AB Suite, you ll have a suite of industry-standard capabilities that allows you to do just that. Because AB Suite integrates with both Microsoft Visual Studio and TFS, you ll be able to use the combined abilities of these environments to make development faster, easier, and more powerful. Likewise, you ll be able to integrate applications using a number of industry-standard tools and interfaces. For instance, you can use both Web Services and IBM message queuing integration to connect with internal and external technologies, helping your applications serve as central components in today s highly connected environments. And with a wide array of XML-focused features, your applications will be free to send, parse, interpret, and process XML communications from a variety of sources, increasing business agility. 5

6 Skills for Today, Skills for Tomorrow You ll Maximize Your Team s Abilities It s not always easy keeping pace with technology changes. That said, falling behind can leave your team at a decided disadvantage. With AB Suite, you ll have a thoroughly modern development environment backed by Visual Studio and TFS integration that helps you keep pace with change by expanding the skillsets your developers have already established. Your team can use a common development environment for.net and ClearPath MCP application deployments, giving them an unprecedented level of platform independence. You ll enable them to generate and deploy the application, database, UI, and reports from a single specification. At the same time, you ll shield your developers from the complexities of composite application development by integrating AB Suite components with other services across multiple operating environments. In the end, you ll boost productivity and make it easier to deliver high-quality applications faster. You ll Foster the Next Generation While simplifying life for your existing team is certainly important, it s just as crucial to make your development environment attractive to tomorrow s programmers. After all, you ll need their talent on your side if you re to stay relevant. With AB Suite, you ll have a development environment that leverages the industry-popular Visual Studio interface and Object-Oriented programming concepts that have been incorporated into college and university courses. These institutions recognize the value of model-driven development and see AB Suite as the key way to teach these and other modern concepts to today s students. So by using AB Suite, you ll be able to attract up-andcoming developers and quickly turn them into productive members of your team. And when you do, you ll know your organization is in good hands and well positioned to do great things in the future. 6

7 The Freedom You Need, the Support You Demand You ll Maximize Flexibility The pace with which change happens today emphasizes the importance of quick, decisive action. You must be able to shift how you operate and then shift again to deliver the right capabilities to the right audience at the right time. With AB Suite, you ll have access to the ClearPath Software Series for MCP Operating Environment products, a suite of software-only deliverables that helps you develop what you want when you want, regardless of the hardware you use to get there. For example, you can allow full teams and individual developers to work simultaneously within a single system, shortening the time required to push new capabilities into production. Likewise, you ll be able to deploy an entire operating environment, including AB Suite, as a software-only package on industry-standard hardware or hypervisors. You ll Be Supported Every Step of the Way Adopting AB Suite opens up a wide world of possibilities. And no matter if it s before the move, during the implementation process, or after you ve gone live, we ll make sure you benefit from all the software has to offer. If you re an EAE shop, you can rely on the EAE to AB Suite Assessment service to help you address any areas requiring special attention during the upgrade process. You ll also be able to identify new AB Suite features that could be particularly beneficial to your team. And once you re live on AB Suite, you ll have access to post-upgrade services that can help you modernize the user experience by showing you how to mobileenable your AB Suite applications or integrate them into a SOA landscape. You ll learn how the latest AB Suite capabilities can add more value to your applications. And you ll see how to close skill gaps, so you have more time to focus on strategic matters. 7

8 Embrace the Application Era The Fast Track to Innovation Getting more from existing applications while helping them perform better. Increasing accessibility without compromising security. Fostering a new generation of developers and supporting the latest, most contemporary techniques. When you use AB Suite, you ll be able to do it all and then some. With AB Suite, you ll be able to accelerate the development process by utilizing a model in which all elements are related to one another. You ll shorten the time you spend maintaining and testing code. You ll build stable, resilient applications that can securely support massive transaction volumes while delivering excellent performance, exceptional data integrity, and high levels of availability. And you ll increase agility, so you can stay aligned with whatever direction your organization is headed next. Business Value Redefined And when you make development an agile, rapid process, you ll find yourself in a prime position to deliver ongoing value to the business. You ll release new applications faster and turn capabilities like mobile access and SOA integration into competitive differentiators. You ll discover new ways to deliver value to your customers. And you ll be able to shift your focus from the long run to the short term, so you can capitalize on emerging opportunities before your rivals are even aware they exist. In short, when you use AB Suite, you won t simply react to change. You ll have the capabilities you need to make it your competitive advantage. Please visit our web site to learn more about all the great things AB Suite can do for your business. And if you have questions about AB Suite, feel free to reach out to us at ABSuite@unisys.com Unisys Corporation. All rights reserved. Unisys and other Unisys product and service names mentioned herein, as well as their respective logos, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Unisys Corporation. All other trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners. Printed in the United States of America 04/