In business enterprise today, complications crop up due to vast spread of employees across the world, varying time zones, and lack of communications across disciplines. But the most significant factor that restricts any local or global business to run smoothly is the lack of integration of the numerous IT tools. To manage this, Kovair’s Omnibus Integration Technology has come up with some key, solutions which include:

• Integrating best-of-breed application lifecycle management (ALM) tools
• Supporting Global Application Development
• Automating end-to-end processes
• Overall traceability
• Total visibility
• Change propagation
• Regulatory compliance

The Kovair Solution – Omnibus

Innovation of Omnibus by Kovair has facilitated to resolve several challenges facing both local and global organizations. Omnibus provides a vendor-neutral ALM platform, which allows the integration of standard ALM tools using Kovair Adapters. Organizations can utilize certain tools they own such as Doors for requirements management, ClearCase for configuration management, and Quality Center for test management, or use custom-made homegrown products to support various application lifecycle phases by integrating through Omnibus. This ensures cross-lifecycle transparency, macro and micro-level processes automation and correspondence of activities across disciplines.

What Makes Omnibus Unique?

• Single repository:

Through Omnibus, Kovair Global Lifecycle offers an open and seamless integration platform incorporating each of the essential ALM services (e.g. collaboration, traceability, process automation, security, reporting and analytics).  The defining characteristic setting Omnibus apart is that each of these services is consolidated into a single repository.  Organizations can easily configure any application lifecycle phase, including Requirements Management, Development, Design, Configuration, Test, and Risk Management, with either industry standard best practice templates or proprietary processes.

• Omnibus as Hub vs. Point-to-point

With Omnibus’s Hub or Bus architecture the complexity of multiple tool integration is drastically reduced from that for a point-to-point integration architecture. An organization integrating 10 tools will need 45 separate point-to-point integrations, whereas for Kovair’s bus architecture needs just 10 integrations to achieve the same completeness. This reduced complexity results in reduction in cost and effort in creating and maintaining all of these integrations.

• Web Service standard based

Omnibus is based on Web service standards using SOAP protocol. This allows any 3rd party tools, applications, legacy software and even RDBMS or file based data-sources to be integrated independent of their Hardware/ OS, technology platform or location. This standard being firewall friendly, will allow these tools be integrated even when they reside behind multiple enterprise firewalls without compromising the enterprise security standards.

• High level ‘Tool Class’ specific API

Omnibus is a set of API function calls which are used for creating ‘Adapters’ for various tools and applications. Carefully designed APIs are grouped for various classes of ALM and IT tools which reduces the effort in creating different Adapters. For example Omnibus API knows the concept of check-in/ check-out for the version control/ configuration management tools. For flexibility Omnibus also includes low level API for accessing the detail functionality of Kovair Global Lifecycle.

• Thin Adapters – no hard-coded business rules

One unique feature of Omnibus is in separating out the integration business rules from the Tool adapters. This results in a quick development of thin Adapters which just does execute data I/O. The business rules can be very easily defined and maintained by the Kovair Global Lifecycle administrator by configuring ‘Service Flow’ without a single line of code. This also allows the same Adapters to be used by various enterprises using their own business rules.

• Augmenting integrated tools’ capabilities

Omnibus being part of the larger Kovair Global Lifecycle applications suite, offers many of the Kovair Global Lifecycle’s advanced functionality to the integrated tools as add-on capability. A tool which lacks process automation gets the power of Kovair’s process automation engine by virtue of the integration with Omnibus.

• Comprehensive and user-friendly web interface:

A convenient web interface offers complete access to ALM services from any location on the globe.  In addition, all ALM services are readily available in a uniform manner, facilitating the use of different individual lifecycle elements. 

• Information is shared between different lifecycle elements

This results in involving stakeholders from other groups and phases at every stage of the development lifecycle which reduces the possibilities of quality lapses. Omnibus facilitates collaboration between tools and tools using groups. This collaboration results in discovering problems much earlier in the Lifecycle which if not fixed, might snowball into a much larger and expensive problem to solve.

• Lifecycle data are traced through phases

Traceability and other relations between artifacts locked in different tools deliver a new level of semantic network. It enables the Requirements, Test Cases, Architecture Model and Issues each residing in a different tool to be related to each other using Traceability Relation. Traceability and other Relations let users know if all requirements are tested or the architecture models cover all functional requirements.

• End-to-end as well as individual lifecycle processes are established and automated

Implementation of a development Process and enforcing it is often the difference between the success and failure of a development project. However, most of the development tools do not have any way to define and automate a process. Even those tools which have built-in process, work in isolation. Omnibus allows integrated tools to take advantage of Kovair’s superior development process engine and also synchronizing processes for different tools and phases.

• Organization specific business rules are enforced across the phases

Kovair Global Lifecycle’s Policy Engine, allows implementation of business rules involving entities in multiple tools.

• Real-time visibility into the application portfolio is achieved by consolidated and synchronized reporting

Consolidated real-time reporting at different levels from various tools at click of a button is possible. Bringing all the related information from multiple tools to a single report automatically saves manual compilation of reports fraught with inefficiency and inaccuracy.

• Global Control without losing local management

Since Omnibus has the capability of integrating local tools used by developers in India, testers in China and system integrators in US, organizations can adapt to heterogeneous culture without sacrificing individual team productivity, thus facilitating and encouraging global application development. Kovair Global Lifecycle promotes the building of a complete ALM environment where application development can be managed as an end-to-end global business process.