The App-DNA™ team has just returned from a busy week in Berlin at the Microsoft Tech-Ed show. This was our first show under the System Center Alliance banner, and proved a great success, lots of interest and lots of Win7 migration leads. Also, proved very valuable in showing the value of the Effort Calculator - stand visitiors really understood the benefit this could bring them in illustrating clearly the time and cost invloved in migrating applications to the new OS.

Come and see us at stand SC2 at Tech-Ed in Berlin, see the Effort Calculator demo and enter the draw for the signed Jenson Button print!

These are perennial and key questions for organisations facing migration to a new OS. Generally, for organisations, the ‘how much’ comes with a pinching of the face expression as previous migrations are remembered. Migration is often a dirty word based on prior experiences. They can be very disruptive to the business and overrun in both time and cost. We understand this at App-DNA™ and its one of the drivers for our technology. Knowing the state of your applications before getting into a migration has already made a huge difference to many organisations using AppTitude™. The accuracy and granularity with which we identify issues makes the prospect of migration less daunting for organisations and less risky for service partners and makes for significantly faster and more robust projects.

The logical question if you know what the issues are is: how long it will take to remediate and test the apps and how much will that cost? We’ve taken that question and feedback on board and extended how we report the situation. The logic is pretty straight forward:

1.       Analyse the apps and identify issues (this is our ‘application DNA’)

2.       Assign a remediation action to each issue and how much effort is associated with the action (use or modify the defaults to reflect the project process)

3.       Establish the internal complexity of the applications (the premise is that complex apps take longer to handle than simple apps)

4.       Add resource, cost and various other configurable variables

Based on a sample of applications (or indeed the whole portfolio) which we analyse we can then derive the spread of issues and application complexity. This can be used to extrapolate the effort for the whole portfolio. I’m pretty excited by the prospect of what this can achieve for both our customers and partners. I’m always driven to bring as much accuracy, transparency and configurability to the representation of issues and their remediation for organisations who manage application portfolios.

Windows 7 in particular is looking like a great prospect as an OS and it is receiving some pretty surprising levels of early adoption. Adding the level of detail which the effort calculator brings to the estimation and execution of migrations will make this a very different journey from some of those previous migrations. Basically we can now show the current state of the portfolio and how much and how long it will take to prepare the applications for deployment.

The effort needed to migrate to Windows 7 and other platforms just got clearer! App-DNA™ has launched the Effort Calculator as part of it's AppTitude product. The Effort Calculator uses raw data sepcific to your organisation, generated by AppTitude, to show you the exact time and cost needed to get your apps migrated. Have a look at the demo here www.app-dna.com/effortcalculator

Stand no. for App-DNA™ at Tech-Ed next week is now confirmed - we are at stand SC2 at the System Center Alliance pavilion. Come along and find out more about AppTitude™, get a demo, talk to the appcompat experts.