Rally Software Debuts First ALM Data Warehouse in the Cloud for Near-Limitless Options in Custom Reporting

Third generation of Agile ALM solution also introduces social media collaboration tools and role-based dashboards to support productive team members

BOULDER, Colo., August 25, 2009 - Rally®, the Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) leader, today unveiled the third generation of its award-winning Agile ALM solution featuring the first ALM data warehouse in the cloud. Rally's ALM data warehouse will eliminate the problem of "canned" reports that fail to answer the tough project questions development teams face every day by providing almost limitless options for custom reporting.

Because every company and market is evolving, no vendor can anticipate all of the real-world questions that development organizations must answer for themselves and their stakeholders. Rally's new ALM data warehouse lets organizations build the custom roll-up and drill-down reports needed to confidently deploy their scarce resources toward opportunities with the biggest returns. Unlike most ALM vendors that rely on infrequent snapshots to build reports, Rally's new analytical database is updated in near-real-time and, because it's SaaS, it requires zero customer infrastructure or costs to use.

"Executives need to know which big features to invest in, when they will be delivered and how projects are tracking to budget," said Zach Nies, VP of Products at Rally. "At the same time, development teams have to make hundreds of decisions for every release. Rally's ALM data warehouse will provide decision support tools to instantly view status across distributed teams, analyze the root cause of problems, and better forecast feature delivery."

In addition, Rally's new customizable user interface includes social media tools to improve collaboration among distributed teams. It also incorporates role-based dashboards to filter the vast amounts of data available throughout the development lifecycle to only what each role needs be a productive team member.

"A customizable user interface enables users to tailor their experience to fit their role responsibilities and preferred style of working. However, too many customization options can become overwhelming for users," said Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "The solution is to provide several pre-tweaked user interface options based upon the user's role responsibilities and then let them tune that user interface to suit their personal style of working. The result: users will be happier, more efficient and the entire team will be more productive."

New features in Rally Release 2009.4 and upcoming Q4 2009 releases include:

  • Report Designer - Rally's new report designer increases visibility into status and quality across the development lifecycle. Users can create a near infinite number of custom reports tailored to their unique processes and use them to explore the root cause of problems and better forecast feature delivery.
  • Role-based Dashboards - New role-based dashboards for Contributors, Managers, and Executives make it easy to learn and use Agile processes and the Rally tool. Each role is provided with the appropriate starting point for their Agile initiatives with options to tune their view to match their unique needs. This gives users the ability to focus on the information they need to be a productive team member.
  • Recent Activity Stream - Rally's new recent activity stream uses social media-style collaboration tools to surface the project activity that team members care about. It's now easy to answer the question, "What's changed since I last checked in?" Users can easily contribute to team discussions without leaving the application.
  • Time Tracking - Rally's new time tracking feature lets developers enter their time at several possible levels of granularity, including projects and tasks, without needing to go to another timesheet or application. Hours spent by development can be aggregated, reported and exported for budget tracking, billing, and capitalization purposes.
  • Kanban Mashup - Rally's new Kanban mashup gives teams the option of managing pull-based, Lean software development projects alongside other iterative and time-boxed projects.
  • Faster Performance - Performance for Rally's global customers has improved by over 30%. Rally's new user experience will provide an additional 25% improvement in performance based on a reduction in initial page size and enhanced in-line editing.

"Our teams store incredible amounts of data in Rally and it has really become the hub of our development organization," said Erik Huddleston, Chief Technology Officer, Inovis.  "Rally's new custom reporting flexibility will give me the right information and make it actionable in a way that supports our organization's unique ‘Agile analytics' needs."

"Our global deployment spans nine countries on four continents, with our largest centers in China and India," said Alan MacLamroc, Chief Product and Technology Officer, CDC Software. "By using Agile and Rally, we have been able to improve our speed-to-market threefold while dramatically reducing our costs. Rally's new custom reporting will give us even more flexibility to tailor reports to meet the specific needs of our teams and executives by communicating our schedules and deliverables."

Pricing and Availability

New features are available to customers either directly through the application, or by signing up for a beta program in Rally's online community, Agile Commons. Rally's Agile ALM solutions are available in two editions. Rally Community Edition is free for up to 10 users, and Rally Enterprise Edition starts at $35/user/month. For detailed product capabilities, see Rally's Edition Comparison guide.

About Rally

Rally is the leader in Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) dedicated to making distributed development organizations faster and leaner by dramatically cutting the time, cost and effort needed to deliver high quality applications. According to a study by QSM Associates, software-driven companies that rely on Rally's Agile ALM products and services are 50% faster to market and 25% more productive than industry averages. Rally's products were honored with four consecutive Jolt awards (the software industry's equivalent of the Oscar® award) in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. The company's end-to-end solutions for Agile development also include Agile University, the leading source for Agile training, and Agile Commons, the largest collaborative Web 2.0 community dedicated to advancing software agility. Rally currently supports more than 1,800 corporate customers, 48,000 projects and 75,000 users in 50 countries. For more information, visit www.rallydev.com.

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Press Contact: Anne Greenhaw
303-565-2832
anne@rallydev.com