[rpalomo]

Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, April 15, 2008 — Polarion Software, creators of fully integrated application lifecycle management solutions and services, today announced the launch of a new, free ALM starter platform, Polarion ALM Community for Subversion. Built atop open source systems that includes Eclipse, Subversion, Apache, and Maven, the product is designed to provide an easy, cost-free entry to a fully integrated application lifecycle management platform with seamless, affordable, and painless upward mobility for the future.

“Many people we talk to know about ALM, want to do more with it, but are concerned that today’s low-end point solutions will leave them stranded when their needs grow,” said Stefano Rizzo, Vice President for Product Management at Polarion Software. “Polarion ALM Community offers a free entry point to a fully-integrated ALM platform with robust capabilities today, and provides seamless mobility all the way to our enterprise-level platform for future growth.”

Polarion ALM Community is designed for organizations and teams seeking a solution to integrate configuration management and version control with bug tracking and change management now, but who have an eye towards future growth. Major capabilities and features include:

• State-of-the-art integrated web-based bug tracker (the same one included in Polarion's enterprise ALM product)
• Issue-to-revision linking with dependency and other relationships
• Workflow-based issue life cycle support
• Live Project Overview revealing key project statistics, and updated in real time as people work on projects.
• Deeply integrated Subversion repository (with integrated web client) that tracks and versions source code, and all process artifacts ranging from requirements, bugs and tasks to file attachments and collaboration comments. (A free importer tool is available to migrate existing repositories from CVS and common commercial version control products to Polarion’s Subversion repository.)
• Cross-platform support with distributions for Windows and popular 32-bit and 64-bit Linux distros, and automated installation on supported OS platforms
• Simple XML-based configuration with online administration interface
• Seamless upward mobility to broader ALM coverage all the way to enterprise level with no additional download, installation, or integration required.

Polarion ALM Community may be licensed for free. Prospective users may request whatever number of users they need for their team when registering. Licenses are non-expiring, and users may update to maintenance releases without charge. Technical support is not included but a support package may be purchased.

When users’ needs grow, Polarion ALM Community can easily be upgraded to one of Polarion Software’s other ALM Solutions:

• Polarion ALM Pro for Subversion which broadens ALM capabilities into the areas of project planning and management, time tracking and management, build management, and Wiki-based team collaboration and communication.
• Polarion ALM Enterprise for Subversion which includes all capabilities and features of the other products and reaches still further, covering advanced requirements management, quality assurance, process audit, and maturity model compliance (CMMI, SPICE).

"We have chosen Polarion ALM as optimal support for our Project, Requirements and Change Management processes,” said Maria Cristina Giaccon, QA Manager of the corporate CMMI certification project at Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, an Italian IT services provider with more than 3,800 professionals across Europe. “In particular, we liked its customization simplicity that allowed us, in a very short time, to plug it into our specific needs for formal fulfillment of the requirements of the CMMI model, whose level 3 certification we are pursuing."

Licenses for the Pro and Enterprise products may be “mixed and matched” to provide different stakeholders with just the ALM capabilities they need. Upward mobility from Polarion ALM Community involves only replacing that license with a license for either or both of the other ALM solutions.

More information about Polarion ALM Community is available online at www.polairon.com/products/alm/comm.php.

Download and registration for the free product license is available from www.polarion.com/downloads/alm.php.

Learn more about Polarion Software’s innovative, open-source based, full-lifecycle ALM platform solutions at www.polarion.com/products/.