What is Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)?

Many companies today use multiple software products in their business process. These applications are critical for companies. Therefore, a good application management strategy should be developed to manage software projects from start to finish in order to achieve the level of capability and efficiency of companies. This is where Application Lifecycle Management comes into play. Application Lifecycle Management is a methodological approach that increases control over existing applications.

What is Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)?

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is the tracking process that manages software applications from initial purchasing to retirement. The purpose of Application Lifecycle Management is to unify the lifecycle elements of any application and improve IT efficiency. Application Lifecycle Management enables businesses to access more logs about the applications they own and use. According to the information obtained from here, companies can make an investment or an eliminate decision about these applications. Application Lifecycle Management covers onpremise, cloud, SaaS and all other applications.

When an application is purchased, it is added to the ALM system and can be tracked throughout its lifecycle. The ALM system can help with the purchase decision itself by providing information on how many licenses are needed, what features are included in those licenses, and how well others have used the product.

Once an application has been in use for some time, it should be evaluated for new features and improvements. This evaluation can be done by comparing it against other similar products or against newer versions of itself. When evaluating a product, you should consider whether or not it meets your current needs, or if there is something better out there. If there is something better out there, then you need to determine whether or not it would be worth upgrading and if so, when would be the best time?

Once you have decided what path you are going down with your product evaluation and upgrade process, then you need to ensure that your customers know about any changes that might affect them in any way (i.e., loss of functionality). This could include providing them with tools that allow them to migrate over their data without losing any features that they may rely on regularly.

Benefits of Application Lifecycle Management

With the digital transformation, the IT expenditures of companies are increasing day by day. So, do all companies achieve success with digital transformation? The answer is of course no. Only companies that make the right IT investments succeed. It is critical here that CIOs and IT managers dominate the company's IT infrastructure. More systematic management and monitoring of IT infrastructure provide IT teams with the right insights. Implementation of the Application Lifecycle Management strategy provides accurate insights into all applications owned by the company.

We can summarize the benefits of Application Lifecycle Management to companies as follows:

• Shows all costs for an application.
• Gives information about application maintenance history.
• Provides IT investment insights.
• Eliminates unnecessary applications.

ALM is a subset of software asset management (SAM) and encompasses the monitoring, maintenance, and deployment of application software. The primary purpose of ALM is to ensure that an organization's investment in software is maximized. This can be accomplished by providing effective support for application development, deployment and maintenance, as well as ensuring compliance with corporate standards.

The ALM process provides for the following:

• Application portfolio management (APM): Managing the overall scope of your organization's applications and projects
• Project portfolio management (PPM): Managing multiple projects across an organization
• Software asset management (SAM): Tracking the number of licenses used by each application in an organization
• Configuration management database (CMDB): Tracking changes made to a configuration item over time

What is Application Lifecycle Management Software?

Application Lifecycle Management software is a digital solution developed to monitor the life cycle of applications faster, more efficiently and with minimum effort compared to traditional methods. In the past, businesses used spreadsheets to keep track of their applications. While application lifecycle management with spreadsheets is relatively adequate for small businesses, it is rather inefficient for medium and large businesses. For this reason, large enterprises need an integrated system to manage their application inventories and life cycles of their applications.

What is Application Portfolio Management (APM)?

Application Portfolio Management (APM) is a framework that provides an inventory of company software applications and metrics to manage an enterprise's IT software applications and software-based services and demonstrate to administrators the business benefits of each application.

Application Portfolio Management helps identify functional requirements for application maintenance and development and is the process of managing a portfolio of related applications in terms of functionality and data dependency. Assists in the design and deployment of applications owned by the organization to support business processes and provide ongoing support.

Application Lifecycle Management is one of the key components of the Application Portfolio Methodology. Application Portfolio Management, a subcomponent of IT Asset Management, represents the business processes for managing and monitoring the application inventories owned by a company. With APM, companies can find answers to their questions such as "what applications do I have?", "which departments use these applications?", "how much do these applications cost?".