MKS Integrity 2007 Leads ALM 2.0 Revolution

Waterloo, ON – July 27, 2007: MKS Inc. (MKS) (TSX: MKX) announced today bold new extensions to its application lifecycle management (ALM) platform, MKS Integrity, becoming the first and only ALM vendor to offer:

- Revolutionary support for requirements change management, reuse, persistence and baselining
- Enforced process control SAP and Oracle/Peoplesoft change management,
- Unified test management, and
- IT service management

All within MKS’s ALM 2.0 platform framework.

“Since 2001, MKS has been progressively building out a next generation ALM platform that fulfils the ALM 2.0 vision set out by industry analyst such as Forrester and Gartner,” says Philip Deck, CEO, MKS. “This release takes innovation from MKS to an entirely new level, and delivers groundbreaking capabilities for reuse, packaged application change management and usability enhancements supporting a much broader deployment of ALM across IT disciplines. MKS’s ability to leap frog the competition on multiple fronts is due to our built-by-design, single platform and unique, unified data model enabling development (ALM) and operational (IT Service Management/ITIL) data to be joined within a single system. One day all ALM solutions will be compared against MKS’s unified model as the competition and their customers continue to struggle with the integration of various disparate point tools.”

Announcing Next Generation Requirements Management

Business strategies such as Software Product Lines and SOA and the sheer pace of innovation demand IT organizations reuse requirements, test specifications and documentation in parallel development scenarios while maintaining traceability throughout the lifecycle.

Leveraging MKS’s longstanding expertise in software configuration management (SCM), MKS is proud to be first to market with support for:

- Unified requirements change management allowing individual requirements or documents to follow their own lifecycle path;
- Requirements reuse and persistence - a unique capability allowing for groups of requirements to be associated and re-used in a parallel development scenario
- Requirements versioning and baselines - providing the ability to securely identify a point in history for a requirement or document, and navigate the system based on that baseline, and begin new work with the baseline as a starting point.

MKS is unique in offering this capability. No traditional, first generation requirements management vendor can offer reuse capabilities of this power, and no vendor other than MKS has the core platform architecture to do so in the near term. The combined power of database-centric and document-centric capabilities allows for rich mining of data and ease of use in managing the extensive documentation and specifications typically associated with managing thousands of requirements.

This release also expands MKS’s requirements solution with a new document view and rich text support providing business analysts with the ability to author requirements in a traditional and familiar document format.

“We looked at the market extensively for a solution to manage our requirements and it became very clear that only one solution provided a complete integration with our development and test environments, and this was MKS Integrity,” says Tom Clark, Head of Quality Implementation, HSBC plc. “Now, with MKS Integrity 2007, we have the ability to not only integrate all requirements right to down to the source code, and across to quality management, but also have the capability to represent these requirements as interrelated items in an easy to manage document, complete with rich text and other document management features.”

"Companies in consumer electronics, automotive manufacturing, and other industries heavily reliant on embedded systems development are craving reuse that really works. Strategic, planned reuse of requirements, test plans and source code allows these organizations to amortize investments in these critical software assets for greater benefit, accelerated innovation, and predictable results," says Bola Rotibi, Application Lifecycle Management Analyst, Ovum.

Announcing Support for Packaged Application Change Management

MKS becomes the first ALM vendor to offer robust solutions for enforced SAP and Oracle/PeopleSoft change management within its single ALM platform. ERP implementations, upgrades and enhancements consume millions in IT dollars and years of staff time. MKS Integrity’s powerful process automates what is currently a painful, spreadsheet-based manual effort, driving down risk, expense and complexity.

“Change management in complex ERP environments is fraught with risk. Despite the critical nature of these systems, change processes are frequently manual, are poorly documented and often difficult to audit. Automation and visibility over change management processes and procedures is viewed to be an instrumental requirement for risk management and sound IT governance,” says Jim Duggan, Research Vice President, Gartner.

Announcing Unified Test Management
MKS becomes the first ALM vendor to deliver test management as an integral part of the ALM platform. Unlike other stand-alone vendor offerings, MKS Integrity’s test management capability breaks down the walls between business analysts, development and QA, liberating teams from their silos to collaborate and communicate. Organizations demanding requirements-based development and testing can now fully unify these processes.

“Unifying the test process function into the overall application lifecycle is a key differentiating ability provided by MKS. When information resides in various point tools, the result is fragmented, disconnected information flow which we believe is a significant barrier to productivity and innovation. MKS’s unified lifecycle approach frees our organization to collaborate effectively and respond quickly,” says Frank Gauld, Vice President, Global Software Engineering, NCR Financial Services Division.

Announcing Software Configuration Management (SCM) Advancements for Increased Developer Productivity

Building on its enviable SCM legacy, MKS is releasing new capabilities that will directly benefit to its core software developer audience including a new streamlined locking model, supporting optimistic locking, non-exclusive locking and exclusive locking of files. This new approach to lock management enables development teams to specify their collaborative model in line with their project requirements.

Availability
MKS Integrity 2007 is available directly from MKS, and for current customers can be downloaded from MKS’s customer community. For pricing and sales information, please contact your MKS sales representative at 1-800-613-7535 (North America), +44- 1483-733919 (UK), +49-711-351775-0 (Germany) or +65-6832-5534 (Asia Pacific).

About MKS
MKS is the premier provider of application lifecycle management solutions for the global 1000. MKS’s flagship ALM solution, MKS Integrity, is the most highly integrated ALM platform in the industry today, spanning all aspects of the software development lifecycle and supporting critical business transformations including SOA, application rationalization and outsourcing. MKS Integrity’s single architecture drives high levels of user productivity, facilitates rapid deployment and process standardization while delivering a complete view of application development activity through real time metrics, trends and reporting. MKS Integrity also provides essential support for IT operations through software deployment and issue management. Founded in 1984, MKS serves more than 10,000 customers in countries across the world. Whether through deployment of MKS’s solution strategically on an enterprise scale, or by leveraging individual components to solve project-level challenges, our customers can use MKS’s software to enable higher levels of process maturity, better manage global development activity and safeguard their most critical business applications and software assets. Under its widely known MKS Toolkit brand, MKS also provides UNIX-Windows co-existence and system administration that significantly cut development and administrative costs and reduce time to market, while enabling enhanced performance. More information about MKS can be found at http://www.mks.com or by calling 1-800-265-2797 (US & Canada), +49-711-351775-0 (Germany), +44-1483-733900 (United Kingdom) and 1-519-884-2251 (Rest of World).