alfabet Announces Release 5.0 of planningIT for IT Planning and Management

Enhances Risk Management, Visualizations and IT Management Integration

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — April 6, 2009 — alfabet,a leading software provider in IT planning and business IT management, today announced Release 5.0 of planningIT.

This major new release includes significant new capabilities aimed at enhancing the user experience and addressing critical issues such as risk management and IT management integration.

“As IT tries to keep pace with the acceleration of the business environment, IT managers have to find that delicate balance between performance and risk,” said Erik Masing, CEO and founder of alfabet. “They need greater insight into risk exposure to be able to understand what IT systems carry risk, what the implications of the risk are and what kind of mitigation measures are needed. This release is highly significant, because in addition to IT management integration, visualizations and other important enhancements, Release 5.0 fully anchors planningIT’s risk management capabilities and establishes as a core process between business and the IT.”

Release 5.0 Highlights:

IT Risk Management: planningIT now enables users to assess (e.g., applications, business processes or projects) according to their degree of risk exposure -- for example, risk of non-compliance to regulatory or contractual guidelines, or risk to business continuity. Those scoring a high degree of risk exposure according to defined enterprise standards can then be further evaluated in detail as to what the danger to the enterprise actually is – be it monetary damages, degradation in customer service or legal jeopardy – in order to know what mitigation strategy is appropriate. Projects to mitigate risk can immediately be initiated and channeled through the standard IT planning process. Scoring tables and risk portfolios are among the aiding elements for the new risk management process support.

Enhanced Usability and Visualization: Personalized cockpits allow customers to reorganize the default page views for all objects for an enhanced user experience targeting the specific needs of each stakeholder. Reorganizing cockpits means users have the most relevant information for them at their fingertips in one overview. Deep drill allows users to navigate to investigate more detailed information.

Integration with Microsoft Office Visio® 2007: Microsoft Office Visio 2007 is the perfect complement to planningIT’s powerful IT planning capabilities. First time planningIT users can continue using the familiar Microsoft Office Visio 2007 tool to create diagrams visualizing solution architectures comfortably from within planningIT. These diagrams – using the company’s existing stencil standards – can be created out of information in the planningIT logical inventory, and existing Microsoft Office Visio 2007 diagrams are automatically updated when objects in the inventory change.  Users can drill down from a Microsoft Office Visio 2007 diagram into the planningIT inventory to view detailed information on a planning object and explore its many different relationships to understand its impact on the IT landscape. By maintaining use of a familiar tool and existing representation standards, IT organizations can increase acceptance for an IT planning tool.

Standard Import Interfaces: planningIT Release 5.0 provides enhanced mechanisms for update of data in the planningIT repository with information from external sources and vice versa supporting full net change capability and imbedding into existing Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) infrastructures and Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) solutions. This enhanced capability supports regular and frequent synchronization between the system of record and planningIT. The user can import objects, their properties and relations to other objects. Objects can be created, edited and deleted. Data from different sources can be written into one single standard XML file for more efficient import and fewer importing errors.

Other enhancements to planningIT release 5.0 include the following:

• Discussion groups promote collaboration on all IT planning-relevant objects and processes.
• New sophisticated visualizations provide for improved transparency into the objet ecosystems.
• Enhancements to automated workflow support process change and precise delegation.

Release 5.0 of planningIT is available immediately on a subscription basis or perpetual license model.

About alfabet (www.alfabet.com)

alfabet enables companies to see, analyze, control and align IT initiatives with business priorities continuously. Its planningIT® software is unique in tightly coupling business priorities and IT returns with current and future initiatives. Competitive point solutions offer modeling or repository functions with a static view of priorities, architecture and infrastructure. alfabet provides a holistic, integrated and collaborative approach that offers continuous transparency into how IT and business information, processes and roles are changing and need to be managed over time.

The company serves a global user community of 20,000 IT professionals in more than 40 countries in a variety of industries, including automotive, financial services, telecommunications, logistics, high-tech and others. Its customers include international corporations such as Credit Suisse, Munich Reinsurance, BMW, AXA Winterthur, Deutsche Bahn, OCBC and T-Systems. Founded in 1997, alfabet is based in Berlin with U.S. headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

All companies and products listed herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

For Additional Information
Contact:
Elyse Familant
GCC, Inc.
978-725-3637
ElyseF@gccpr.com

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