The 3Ds

Supporting Development, Deployment and Delivery of Complex business-critical Applications

Your application development group is under pressure. The group must shift its emphasis from ‘development’ of applications to ‘delivery.’ That means working even more closely with business managers to help them enter new markets, better serve customers, or respond to competitive thrusts. It means weighing whether to buy, build or outsource the applications that support those efforts. It means anticipating that, as you roll out an application, your ‘partners’ in the business unit may rethink their requirements. And knowing that, just as you’ve mastered client/server, end users will start clamoring about the Internet.

It’s a good time to brush up on the ‘3Ds.’ Development, Deployment and Delivery are as fundamental to large-scale application projects as reading, writing and arithmetic are to schooling. Together, the 3Ds can bolster your chances for success in the midst of constant business and technology change. Too often one or more of the dimensions is overlooked. With a strategic framework called UNIFACE in 3-D, Compuware is moving aggressively to address all three.

‘Technology by itself is not enough,’ says Frank Slootman, general manager for the UNIFACE product line. ‘Success at the enterprise level requires the tight coordination of state-of-the-art development and deployment technologies with delivery capabilities such as project services, packaged applications and application frameworks. We’re providing that coordination because we want you to be successful today and into the future.’

UNIFACE in 3-D, explained in more detail below, charts the course of the UNIFACE product through UNIFACE Seven and subsequent releases already underway. And it goes beyond product enhancements to describe other initiatives Compuware is undertaking.

Development. Many users appreciate UNIFACE’s ‘model-driven’ development approach for its balance between ease of use and power. Developers design and specify an application model, construct shared application components, then assemble the components into an application. Whenever business requirements change, developers simply return to the model and update it, rather than start recoding. The components, and therefore the application, inherit modifications from the model.

The UNIFACE in 3-D strategic framework evolves the model-driven paradigm to even higher levels of abstraction. Today, the model reflects implementation constructs such as data. Increasingly, the model will depict business processes. This progression to real-world terms will make it easier for technologists to collaborate with business people - a critical requirement in fast-changing organizations.Compuware refers to this evolution as the integration between business engineering and application engineering.

Deployment. Deployment may have been one of the reasons you chose UNIFACE for your strategic applications. Many of you sought a single tool with which to create applications for different platforms. No other tool supports a wider range of databases, computers, operating systems and networks than UNIFACE. Long-time UNIFACE users have seen how this ‘infrastructure independence’ applies to deployment architectures as well. Since UNIFACE began shipping in 1987, it has carried applications from host-terminal through the different flavors of client/server, without any recoding.

With every advance in technology, the computing environment shifts. With more than 3,000 UNIFACE sites around the world today, Compuware remains committed to protecting UNIFACE applications from those changes in deployment. UNIFACE will stay current with hardware and software technologies as well as new architectures right up to the Internet/Intranet, enabling you to preserve your skills, tools and applications.

Delivery. Successfully delivering strategic applications requires more than development and deployment technologies. Success requires careful choices between purchasing a packaged application, creating a new application from scratch or outsourcing development. Which delivery strategy best suits a particular application depends on business requirements, the timetable for delivery, and the availability of skills and resources.

UNIFACE in 3-D addresses the assistance companies increasingly require when rolling out strategic applications. This assistance includes services, tools and applications support for every delivery strategy. For in-house development Compuware will offer start-up packages, application templates, and semi-completed applications called application frameworks. To support outsourcing, Compuware has a services organization with a 23-year track record in large-scale application projects, training and education. Compuware can provide consultants with technical and project management expertise or, alternatively, engage service providers around the world who specialize in UNIFACE development. Compuware also has global relationships with commercial application providers who use UNIFACE so that their packaged applications and application frameworks deliver the advantages of model-driven development and infrastructure independence. Finally, Compuware offers a full complement of tools for the application life cycle - not just development, but also testing and application management. The company will integrate these tools with UNIFACE to help ensure applications achieve the quality and performance that business managers expect.

Much attention has been focused on business-critical application projects that have failed. With UNIFACE, you have a head start on success. With UNIFACE in 3-D, you gain a strategic framework for development, deployment and delivery of applications equipped for the opportunities and challenges of the dynamic enterprise.