Activities These Tools Support

Software change and configuration management (SCCM) tools are products and suites of products that support the structured approval, assignment, monitoring, execution and reporting of changes to software products for teams and "teams of teams." When projects exceed a couple of dozen participants, enterprises need SCCM products to support the complexity and preserve the traceability, accountability and separation of the duties required.

SCCM tools are continuing to evolve on a path to integrate tightly with or become generalized management platforms for requirements, test plans and other aspects of the application life cycle. Functions that are becoming more common within the products include workflow automation, integration with project management facilities, multisite support and synchronization. Some products already have added multiplatform support, management support for noncode artifacts (including requirements, content, documentation, test case management, and code packaging and distribution).

Compliance and governance initiatives in the IT organization will remain powerful drivers of demand for these features during the next few years.

Product Users and Roles

Users in three roles will employ SCCM — developers, team members and members of related teams — with each role having its own interests and requirements.

• As developers, individual users create much of the base information, creating the basic artifacts and interacting with versioning, configuration and access control mechanisms, usually through the integrated development environment (IDE) of choice. Developers are sensitive to the speed and efficiency of the support and to the detection of and protection from conflicting changes to code elements.
• As team members, individual managers, developers, testers and other individuals participate in the change review process, examining requests for changes or new development requirements for their desirability. In this role, these groups and individuals agree on changes, object to changes, accept or approve changes, assign changes as work items, report progress and request permissions for promotions. Team members will use these systems to provide the information to support auditor inquiries. Additionally, build managers, or project managers, and team members will assemble data and artifacts from developers to build executables for use in the various stages of development.
• As participants of the release or turnover process, teams of members from related teams must coordinate their individual and cross-team activities and must be able to orchestrate the deployment of groups of changes, related and unrelated, into complex heterogeneous production environments. In this role, development staff may delegate asset oversight to their production counterparts, or may contribute to some production processes (see Figure 1).

This sector has seen substantial activity during the past several years. A wave of new requirements has arisen because of increased attention to auditability, globally distributed development, agile practices and the progressive adoption of more-disciplined governance and management oversight. During the past several years, the open-source and commercial products that had been the standards of the sector since the mid-1990s began to decrease in popularity. Many users of Concurrent Versions System (CVS), Visual Source Safe, Polytron Version Control System (PVCS) and IBM's basic ClearCase are exploring new offerings to see whether they are better able to support emerging needs.

For example, the open-source solution Subversion from Tigris.org largely is supplanting CVS; Build Forge has been added to the IBM solution and IBM is in the process of acquiring Telelogic. Serena is consolidating around the Dimensions product line, migrating users from the original Serena Professional Suite (once known as PVCS). Substantial enhancements continue to flow.

Although IBM's Jazz and Microsoft's additions to the Visual Studio Team System are the most commonly mentioned in trade media, substantial evolutions of SCCM products are likely from virtually all market participants during the next 18 months. In particular, we expect most SCCM products to become core to broader offerings that can be better characterized as application life cycle management (ALM) products. This period of innovation should begin to abate by 2010, when some consolidation is expected around the companies most able to satisfy enterprise demands for economical and effective control of development change, configuration and release processes.

The planning, measurement, control and reporting aspects of SCCM tools are central to the capabilities needed for broader ALM. Planning, measurement, and control and reporting capabilities can be found in portfolio management, service management and test management offerings. Rather than manage duplicative capabilities, many vendors in these spaces are likely to integrate around unified facilities (for planning measurement, control and reporting), positioning these as ALM offerings.

Many development organizations can manage only a limited upgrade to their governance practices each year. Thus, we see SCCM and ALM tool offerings continuing their evolution throughout the next five years. In five to seven years, there will be a substantial restructuring of SCCM or ALM offerings to integrate with operational change products, IT change management tools for production and service control, and project and portfolio management offerings toward more-comprehensive IT planning and control suites.

Gartner estimates that market revenue growth for SCCM occurred at an average of 10% to 13% annually during the past several years. The escalation of needs to achieve faster, along with more-successful deployment of changes to software, make it likely that this sector will continue to grow at a rate of 10% annually during the next five years.

New-product license and maintenance revenue was approximately $960 million in 2006. A significant follow-on market exists for consulting and services in implementing these tools and the methods to use them. IBM realized about one-third of this revenue, followed by CA and Serena, each with less than one-fifth of the revenue. The next four vendors — Borland, MKS and Perforce Software and Telelogic — were relatively close in revenue and together account for about the same revenue as Serena. The $960 million SCCM market revenue estimate does not include consulting or service revenue, including that related to product implementation.

Serena Software is a portfolio company of Silver Lake Partners, a private investment firm that also owns a substantial, publicly disclosed interest in Gartner, Inc., and has two seats on Gartner's 11-member Board of Directors. Gartner research is produced independently by the Company's analysts, without the influence, review or approval of our investors, shareholders or directors. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see "Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity" on our Web site, www.gartner.com.

SCCM tools are products and suites that support the structured approval, assignment, monitoring, execution and reporting of changes to software products for teams and teams of teams. Simple versioning and configuration suffice for individuals and small teams, and for loosely coupled projects, but larger efforts involving more than a couple of dozen participants need SCCM products.

To be included in this review, the offerings had to include versioning of modules, traceable configuration of modules that define an application, an access and security model to control access and update rights to code artifacts, robust integration mechanisms to support the integration of other modules and a promotion model to enable the separation of code modules by life cycle stage. Offerings also had to offer one or more of the following: tracing and management of issues and changes through their various stages; support for impact assessment and merging of code branches; workflow management and automation of the change, development configuration and release to production processes; and support for the coordination of parallel development activities occurring on different but dependent platforms or technologies.

SCCM tools are continuing to evolve and can become more-generalized ALM platforms. Additional functionality in some suites includes multiplatform support, management support for noncode artifacts (including requirements, content, documentation, test case management and integration to packaged application change facilities) and code distribution. Interfaces and callable services that permit close integrations with third-party sources of these additional capabilities are desirable, even when some capabilities are included within the package.

Offerings in the SCCM space are grouped into three levels of functionality:

• Lowest-level products focus on the needs of individual developers, providing basic versioning and configuration control.
• Midtier products focus on structured and unstructured collaboration processes for the team of developers. These incorporate more-sophisticated configurations for distributed or parallel development and add a change (issue and defect) tracking function for the development team as a group (including managers, testers and project leaders, as well as developers).
• High-end products integrate process management functionality to support teams of teams, implementing release management, deployment to more-complex production images and support for multiple parallel processes.

Midtier and high-end products are being extended into broader life cycle coordination, integrating requirements, build management and test case management.

If the scale of deployment is small or the processes are slow-moving, then virtually all functionality can be done manually. As organizations try to move faster and collaborate over broader scopes, tooling and automation become progressively more important. Although the processes that should be supported first by tooling will differ, large, fast-moving teams eventually will find benefits in the full scope of the functionality. The major trends of globalization and increased regulation and compliance oversight will continue, tipping the industry toward midtier and high-end offerings.

This level of configuration management of source and other development artifacts is expected in most organizations and is demanded in regulated and audited environments. A repository provides basic cataloging, history, recovery and sharing capabilities to developers. By itself, configuration management does little to improve build accuracy; coordination among development, test and production staff; and visibility of the development process. The most basic products, such as Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe only version modules, providing a tag structure for configuration, and are appropriate for small teams and projects. More-elaborate tools, such as open-source CVS or Subversion, and basic configuration modules of midtier commercial products support project organization of modules and branched versions but have limited capabilities on which to build complex processes.

The more sophisticated configuration functions found in midtier tools add support for parallel development with re-convergent development paths, more-sophisticated access and branching models, and difference/comparison tools to ease administration.

The team tier of functionality for SCCM adds change tracking and management to more-complex versioning support, typically adding support for complex projects and baselines, parallel development and security by role. Teams engaged in long-running projects dealing with a flow of requirements or defects from a deployed project and any team of more than about 25 will benefit from deployment of team functionality.

Change management functionality helps implement governance processes that enable full traceability of an item from conception through approval and design and into deployment. Change management enables the various participants in the development process to assign and report on work, communicate status and capture important aspects of the design, development and test management processes about the underlying software artifacts. These functions become more important as development speed increases, teams from multiple physical locations collaborate and the volume of artifacts to manage grows larger.

Team functions for organizations using open-source products can be developed by integrating ALM offerings, such as those of TechExcel and CollabNet, or by incorporating commercial IT workflow components, for example Atlassian's JIRA, Serena's TeamTrack or MKS's Integrity. An in-depth discussion of these alternatives is beyond the scope of this Magic Quadrant and will be the topic of future ALM research.

Improving the effectiveness of production environments requires significant automation of build and release processes. Multiple teams are common when applications span multiple platforms, are developed with the help of outside resources or are based on packaged software solutions. The workflow engines and process designers included in the most sophisticated SCCM tools make them attractive to organizations deploying to large-scale production images or to a variety of images with individual demands. Automating the workflow of build and release processes improves availability and repeatability. Installation and operation costs for these products generally are less than the costs of doing builds manually or of adding automation scripts external to products.

Just as stand-alone change tools can be added to supplement the base version and configuration capability, stand-alone tools from build automation can be added as an evolutionary step. Although we considered integrated build functionality in our evaluation, the stand-alone capabilities for continuous integration and complex build automation are beyond the scope of this Magic Quadrant. Urbancode (anthillpro), Maven, OpenMake Software and Electric Cloud are vendors with stand-alone build offerings.

This assessment focuses on SCCM products that can meet the demands of a team of developers. Many products have at least some functionality to support teams of teams. Although the advanced functionality is deeper in other quadrants, even niche players have significant functionality to bring to the problems of complex development projects.

To be included in this review, a distributed SCCM product set must minimally include the following functionality, with integration out of the box:

• Traceable configuration and versioning of source code and other modules that define an application
• A security model to control and update rights to access code artifacts
• A promotion model to enable the separation of code modules by the stages of the life cycle

In addition, the product sets must contain two or more of the following:

• Tracing and management of issues and changes through their various stages
• Support for impact assessment and merging of code branches
• Workflow management and automation of the change, development configuration and release to production processes
• Support for the coordination of parallel development activities occurring on different but dependent platforms or technologies

The products must also include:

• Support for at least one of the distributed platforms defined as Windows, Unix and its variants, or Linux. Products that require a Mainframe or iSeries platform as part of the solution are excluded. Also excluded are products that primarily support proprietary forms of program objects. Examples of these are products that target SAP and Oracle packaged applications.
• Products must be in full availability, be marketed as appropriate for enterprise IT use and have at least 100 deployments of at least 25 users each.

Some products in this SCCM assessment qualify as ALM products, but not all ALM products include SCCM functionality. ALM offerings from HP and Compuware are examples.

Stand-alone versioning and configuration products (such as Microsoft's Visual Source Safe and open-source CVS and Subversion) are fundamentally commodity products and are not included in this assessment. By themselves, they are suitable for small, collocated teams or for situations where traceability of change, particularly from executables back to source, is not desired.

Integration costs and support costs become significant, and enterprise projects that need change and release control processes generally don't see a cost or operational advantage from starting with commodity source control. We recommend that clients seeking to exploit open source for full SCCM functionality use companies such as CollabNet and Polarion Software for support and extensions, rather than create proprietary extensions.

AccuRev, Aldon, CA, Borland, IBM, McCabe Software, MKS, Perforce Software, Microsoft, Seapine Software, Serena (Professional), Serena (Dimensions), Telelogic and Visible Systems

None — first iteration

A software vendor's ability to execute in any market indicates the provider's: industry and market presence, reputation, record of business and technical execution, and the degree to which it has delivered the essential core functionality expected of a competitive product supporting change, release and configuration processes within a development organization.

Most buying activity aims at improving the ability of the development organization to respond to rapid release cycles and to improve the ability of teams to collaborate, regardless of their physical location. In addition to the importance of product capabilities, buyers highly value the viability of the vendor, customer experiences with the vendor and the vendor's pricing policies. These characteristics are more important than the vendor's speed of market responsiveness, its marketing flamboyance or the effectiveness of its internal operations. Even so, buyers look for a commitment to the product category, characterized by regular enhancements, a clear product road map and well-funded, effective support organizations. Thus, in the market of SCCM products, the following criteria and weights determine this rating.

Definition of Criteria Contributing to Ability to Execute

Product/Service: The core goods and services offered by the vendor that compete in/serve the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets and skills offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition. Subcriteria for SCCM include functional assessments of the following:

• Configuration management, including versioning and compare
• Change management processes
• Release management and build
• Integration/coexistence/extension
• National language support

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization): Includes an assessment of the organization's overall financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit and the likelihood that the business unit will continue investing in the product, continue offering the product and advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all pre-sales activities and the structures that support them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, pre-sales support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness and Track Record: The ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of the programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote brand and business, increase awareness of the products and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: The relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical and account support. This can include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), the availability of user groups, service-level agreements and others.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis (see Table 1).

The fundamental indication of a software vendor's completeness of vision in any market is the degree to which the vendor anticipates and influences prevailing market trends. For SCCM systems, the vision of a vendor is reflected in its: ability to track mainstream enterprise requirements to support geographically complex teams working with many languages and platforms, establish traceability and accountability in the development process, smoothly and economically implement the buyers' processes and tool integrations, and enhance the product with modern capabilities, without detracting from conservative reliability. Thus, a vendor's market understanding and the resulting product packaging and positioning, as well as investments in intelligent innovation, are all-important, as prospects try to estimate how well a vendor will remain aligned with its long-term requirements.

Geographic and language strategies are of secondary importance, except to the largest multinational corporations and local markets. Sales, marketing and business model strategies are important to users only as further assurances of the continuing popularity of a vendor's products in the market. For the market of SCCM tools, the following criteria and weights determine this rating.

Definition of Criteria

Market Understanding: The ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs, and to translate these into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance these with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the Web site, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communication affiliates that extends the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market (see Table 2).

Leaders in this market are characterized by demonstrably complete solutions on a variety of platforms. Current leaders still have challenges in cost, performance, ease of integration or flexibility of deployment. The breadth of solutions enables tailored enterprise deployments that will fit well into heterogeneous environments (examples include IBM, Serena Dimensions and MKS).

Challengers in this market are principally companies with large or growing installed bases in SCCM, or in closely related spaces, with substantial resources for sales and distribution. Although these vendors are less complete in their offerings than leaders, they offer substantial value and proven capabilities within the scope of their solutions. These vendors are deploying substantial resources to continue to develop and enhance their products (examples include Microsoft and CA).

Visionaries have some outstanding technical elements. They are characterized by narrower distributions, less-comprehensive platform support and fewer or less-mature integrations with associated tools. Within the scope of their support, they can be superior to leading products in price and fit (examples include Aldon, Borland, Perforce Software and AccuRev).

Niche players can be older products being supplanted by newer, more-extensible architectures. They also may be strong technical offerings from companies that have limited or uncertain sales and marketing resources. Telelogic is a special case. Although its product features and functions score extremely well, uncertainty around the European Union's review of the IBM acquisition influenced many of the ranking categories. Resolution of this uncertainty, now likely in second-quarter 2008, would influence Telelogic's end result.

Many niche players offer support for platforms and business models that are not well-served by the products in the other categories. Niche offerings often are from smaller vendors and may offer excellent functionality and operational economics in their focus markets. Limited resources slow the evolution of these offerings, but their particular combinations of technical and industry-specific features make them excellent selections for a substantial proportion of the market (examples include Serena Professional, Telelogic, Seapine, McCabe and Visible Systems).

• There is strong support for parallel development through the streaming model.
• The product provides good support for continuous integration and other sophisticated builds.
• The product is easy to administer and learn.
• Coexistence with ClearCase is well-supported.

• The size and newness of the company mean that there is a small base of experienced users.
• The version browser and merge tool are narrower than those of ClearCase.
• Windows file explorer integration is not native in AccuRev.
• Command line inconsistencies complicate some automations.

• Release and distribution support are designed for complex and challenging situations.
• Strong coordination is available for multiplatform deployments.
• There is a strong affinity with the iSeries product.

• The complexity of the update process creates an administrative burden.
• The user interface for life cycle management is Spartan.
• The company is not well-known outside the iSeries community.

• Client supports a broad variety of platforms through the use of Java.
• The marketing message is well-articulated and well-supported by the internal organizational structure.
• Remote caching over the Web provides good performance for geographically distributed teams.
• There is a strong set of integrations and migrations for complementary tools from Borland and other vendors.

• The company's transformation from an IDE focus remains controversial.
• The Server component must be hosted on Windows.
• New functionality takes several service packs to stabilize.
• The Server needs more-comprehensive monitoring and tuning tools.

• The distributed solution has significant integrations with CA's Enterprise IT Service and Asset Management offerings.
• The distributed product is complementary to CA's mainframe solutions and supports cross-platform deployments well.
• There is a substantial installed base, so some experienced administrators can be found.
• Cross-project impact assessment and package merges are well-supported.
• The product has proved to be scalable to support thousands of remote users supported by a single instance.

• Change request management is not as robust as some alternatives.
• Integration with IDEs is not as sophisticated as some alternatives.
• Integrations with testing and requirements tools are immature.

• The ClearCase/ClearQuest families have the largest share of revenue in this market.
• A large base of developers and administrators is familiar with IBM's offerings.
• IBM and its partners offer a broad range of integrations and complementary products.
• There is a rich feature set across ClearCase, UCM, ClearQuest and Build Forge, from which a wide variety of development processes can be supported.
• IBM offers centralized and replicated support for distributed teams, enabling a broad variety of development models.

• Complex configurations incur high administrative overhead relative to other solutions.
• The price for performance is high, especially when multisite functionality is deployed.
• Combinations of ClearCase, ClearQuest and Build Forge can be complex to configure and maintain.
• Replication is resource-hungry. Latency issues for remote teams can be mitigated by configuration and process choices.

• A unique implementation of Integrated Difference technology efficiently supports parallel development and similar processes.
• The product is stable and requires little administration.
• The installed base includes some large installations.
• The product has broad multiplatform support, including for VMS
• Support quality and availability are extremely good.

• McCabe is small, with limited resources.
• There are no replication or proxy features.
• As a consequence of the smaller installed base, there are few user groups with which to share learning.

• The product has a flexible process model implemented in a single integrated metadata repository.
• Basing around work items reduces programmer overhead for change management.
• Distributed support within a project is well-supported with Web proxies.

• The Server component must be hosted on Windows.
• Clients for non-Microsoft platforms are supplied by a third party.
• Many administration interfaces are sparse, with additional functions to be delivered in later releases.
• The installation process is still Spartan and needs to be simplified.
• Security setup and administration are spread throughout the product, thus are time-consuming

• The company has demonstrated the ability to support large companies with global facilities.
• The product has a flexible process model implemented in a single integrated metadata repository.
• There are specific extensions for requirements, test and distribution management.
• Differencing to support parallel development is well-executed.
• Good metrics on processes can be obtained from the unified depository.
• Proxies and federated support provide high-performance support for geographically distributed development.

• Implementation is slowed by a lack of pre-built process templates.
• The reporting facility is Spartan, requiring the development of even relatively simple reports during implementation.
• The company is not as well-known as and has relatively fewer implementation partners than its competitors.

• The performance of most operations is fast.
• Proxies provide high-performance support for geographically distributed development.
• The product is easy and inexpensive to administer.
• An Apple MAC client with good functionality is available.
• A well-qualified support team is easy for clients to reach.

• Change tools must be from another party through a Perforce interface.
• There are no provisions for shared or floating licenses.
• Integrations of other products to Perforce are complex because of the limited interfaces provided.

• The product is easy to install and upgrade.
• Integrations with Seapine's change and test tool are quite good.
• The product is easy to customize for local practices.
• The product includes an Apple client, as well as the more common Linux, Unix and Windows support.
• The price per seat is low.

• The company has not yet focused on large scale users.
• Relatively few implementation partners are familiar with tools.
• Out-of-the-box Integrations with third-party products are weak.
• The surrounding SCCM is still based on flat files rather than on a relational store.

• There is one repository for requirements, as well as for configuration, change and release.
• There are strong process automation and release functionalities
• The product has good support for Eclipse and Visual Studio.
• The new Express version offers simplified setup.
• The product offers centralized and replicated support for distributed teams, enabling a broad variety of development models.

• Implementation of the full solution is time-consuming and requires consulting
• A significant training program is required for administrators.
• Stability and field support were issues early in the release cycle but are improving.

• Professional and Version Management are easy to learn, use and administer.
• Serena's TeamTrack and Builder components add a lot of value.
• There is a large pool of experienced product users.
• Performance and features have been enhanced substantially during the past few years.

• Moving from Serena Professional to Dimensions requires a migration.
• It is late in life for this product, and Serena is emphasizing that the future will be with Dimensions.
• The knowledge base of support information is incomplete and casts the emphasis on phone support.

• The technical product functions and features rank among the best
• There is a strong process engine supporting multiple processes central to most functions.
• The product is extremely stable and runs for long periods with minimal administration.
• There is a good base of users in the aerospace, automotive and telephony sectors.
• SCCM is well-integrated with Telelogic's other offerings.

• The European Union's review of IBM's pending acquisition creates uncertainty in sales, marketing and product plans. Consult the company for the latest status.
• Performance over WAN is an issue but can be mitigated by configuration and process choices.
• The presence in the financial sector is limited outside Europe.

• The product has a clear focus on support for the government-contracting environment.
• Contract terms and conditions are tailored to be attractive for use where subcontractors must be supported.
• The product is easy to learn and maintain, and has a low initial cost.

• There are limited installations in larger groups.
• The company is small and has a limited sales and marketing reach.
• There is no current support for Eclipse.
• The nonrelational version store is limiting.