With its flagship product, MKS Integrity, MKS offers support for all software development activities through a single enterprise application, resulting in improved global collaboration and higher productivity.
MKS Integrity permits ALM within large engineering and IT organisations that require enterprise-class scalability and multi-platform capability. MKS offers unrivalled support for geographically dispersed teams, artifact reuse, reporting, security, auditability, traceability and metrics automation.
Overview of ALM market
Unlike other ALM offerings that have been assembled by acquisition, MKS Integrity provides consistent capabilities across all disciplines of the application lifecycle, including requirements management, system design, software configuration management, change management, test management, defect management, deployment management and portfolio management for custom-built and packaged applications, such as SAP and PeopleSoft.
"In an upset, the three year-old requirements management capabilities in MKS's ALM solution turned in the highest current offering score in our evaluation... The product includes outstanding support for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel as requirements input mechanisms and superior support for requirements reuse (both core requirements management capabilities) in addition to great strength in security, workflow and reporting (all typical capabilities of an ALM solution)," concludes Forrester Research in their report The Forrester Wave: Requirements Management, Q2 2008.
MKS Integrity establishes a single application data framework that defines hierarchies, relationships and change management processes for numerous user-defined application artifacts types such as requirements, design specifications, source code, test plans, test cases, change requests, defects, portfolios and deploy requests. The single data framework ensures consistent artifact management and integrity across numerous development disciplines, processes and projects.
By constructing a unified application data framework, MKS Integrity enables large-scale collaboration across users from many geographical locations and disciplines, supports large-scale software reuse initiatives, such as services oriented architectures (SOA) or software product lines (SPL), facilitates application portfolio management strategies and automates compliance efforts such as FDA 21-CFR Part 11, CoBIT or CMMI. Through its unified data framework, MKS Integrity also enables rich mining of application activity data to automatically collect the metrics that support key performance indicators or manage application and project portfolios.
In Butler Group's opinion, "While differences in functional capabilities are areas comparable vendors might eventually address, the MKS history of integration by design, and not in retrospect, offers benefits to internal development functions that would be hard to match."
MKS supports customers worldwide, with offices across North America, Europe and Asia.
