News and Events in UK

Hear Dr. Rebecca Parsons, CTO, ThoughtWorks and Dr. Bill Curtis, CAST Chief Scientist and Co-Author of CMM, explain how to adopt Agile on core business systems to improve productivity, quality and business outcomes.

Please join us for a teleconference with Bill Martorelli, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Bill will show how leading companies are fostering vendor innovation and high-quality delivery while holding down costs.

Please join Dr. Bill Curtis, co-author of the CMM and Chief Scientist at CAST for an exclusive Networking Lunch with senior executives including Dr. Hans Wagner, Head of IT at the European Medicines Agency on Wednesday, 14th July at The Royal Automobile Club, Pall Mall.

For more information or to express your interest in attending

Q&A web session, “Inside the SAP Black Box” with experts and end users from BIAC (IT subsidiary of Vienna Insurance Group) and Adventier on lowering costs and risks of SAP implementations.

At this invitation-only breakfast in London on Thursday, 17th June, CSC executive, Patrick Molineux, and Paul Bentz, the former-CIO of Allianz, will lead a discussion around how IT can meet business objectives without dragging down IT productivity and increasing complexity.

For more information or to express your interest in attending

Please join Mr. Peter De Boel of FedEx, Manager, IT Strategic Planning and Programs, EMEA for an online dialogue about how FedEx uses automated software analysis and measurement to align IT with business objectives.

Please join CAST’s own enterprise application expert, Gerard Karsenti, EVP Enterprise Business Development. Mr. Karsenti will explain how to control some of the problems introduced by extensive customization, and how automated analysis and measurement can bring about rapid improvement in user experience and much lower maintenance costs.

Join us for a webinar on January 27 at 11am EST (5pm CET, 4pm GMT, 8am PDT) and lively discussion with Capers Jones, a world-renowned authority on software measurement. Mr. Jones is an expert in function points, and has written extensively on function point sizing, automated function points, and function point methodology.

Many IT leaders acknowledge that they are reluctantly ‘flying blind’ when it comes to the quality of their IT applications, the performance of their vendors, or how their development outcomes compare to others in the same industry. Until now, there was no single source for this valuable information.

CAST is proud to announce the first application quality benchmarking repository.

Please join us for an online presentation on December 3rd at 11am EST (5pm CET, 4pm GMT, 8am PDT), where CAST will discuss the initial findings and insights from the analysis of thousands of applications across many industries.

Please join us for a detailed presentation and discussion around the new features available in CAST Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) version 6.4, the latest release of the only enterprise-grade software quality assessment and performance measurement solution.

Many organizations think of QA as a necessary evil to make sure the product that’s shipped is just good enough for production. Some view QA as the last stage gate to prevent IT risk in their systems. Only the forward-looking organizations think of their software quality program as a competitive differentiator that makes them leaner, faster, and more efficient.

On Wednesday, 7th October, at The Glasshouse Hotel, Edinburgh, Cast Software and Sopra Group invite you to attend an IT Efficiency Seminar. The theme is 'Take the Cost Out and put the Quality Back In to your IT Development Projects' and is intended to show attendees that by measuring and monitoring application quality from the start of the lifecycle you can drive costs out of your business, deliver faster and develop high-quality solutions.

For more information

Join us for an in-depth discussion with Capers Jones, a well-recognized authority on software measurement. Having written some of the most widely read books on software productivity, Mr. Jones is an expert regarding Function Points and the state of the art in productivity measurement

Join this webinar one-time event, where , Gene Baker, VP of Application Development and Chief Architect at WySTAR tells us how he made the business case for investing in application quality, and the impressive results they've achieved at WySTAR (a subsidiary of Wells Fargo Bank)

Join this webinar one-time event, where a prominent IT thought leader, Bill Martorelli, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, will discuss best practices and key industry trends on multi-sourcing

In this webinar, Mr. Gil Hoffman, CIO, Maritz, will share his practical experience and insight on enabling his team to enhance business agility and innovation while addressing hard IT cost.

You are invited to an executive CAST breakfast hosted by Paul Camille Benz and Alan Rodger to discuss how organisations like yours can avoid costly IT issues in times of intense cost-cutting.

In the current economic conditions in 2009, heads of IT face a seemingly impossible mission - to significantly cut hard IT costs while simultaneously improving business end-user productivity. This is no longer a choice - the tradeoff between cost and business performance must be broken

Mr. Carlos Goncalves, Head of IT, Société Générale Global Equities & Derivatives will share his practical experiences and insight on how his team is enhancing software quality and aiming to increase business productivity at Societé Generale.

Over the last decade agile methods have been evolving to incorporate practices that address some of these concerns. Please join us for a discussion with Dr. Bill Curtis, Chief Scientist at CAST, about how an organization should implement agile methods and approach the decision to use them on business-critical applications. In particular he will address the issues of sustaining architectural integrity, ensuring application quality, and managing team coordination in a highly distributed environment.

Join us online on October 2nd, as our Chief Scientist, Dr. Bill Curtis, navigates the jargon and techniques of lean and explains what's fad and what can actually be useful in application development and maintenance.

Dr. Bill Curtis is senior vice president and chief scientist of CAST Software. He is a globally recognized expert in software process and quality, who co-authored the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). Prior to CAST, he was the co-founder and Chief Scientist of TeraQuest, a global leader in providing CMM-based services, which was acquired by Borland. Formerly the Director of the Software Process Program in the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, he has published four books, more than 150 articles, and was recently elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Traditional outsourcing models have resulted in significant tradeoffs and dissatisfaction between the Enterprise and the Outsourcer. The majority of the enterprises feel that the cost of outsourcing has been as or more expensive than doing the same work in-house. On the other hand, Vendors, in spite of aggressive pricing resulting in razor-thin margins and aggressive cost reduction curves, constantly face the wrath of customer dissatisfaction.

The reality - outsourcing is here to stay. So, just how do you make this partnership a win-win?

Carey Schwaber, Sr. Application Development Analyst with Forrester Research, will discuss how organizations must take a proactive approach to managing the quality of their custom applications. This Webinar will outline a holistic approach for managing technical quality and the functional quality of software, as well as how quality management ties in to the overall governance of application development. It will include case studies of global organizations already using these software quality strategies.

Discover during the course of a 45 minute Webinar - including a presentation, a demonstration and some practical examples of client usage - the CAST solution for Technical Quality Insurance, Automated Technical Documentation, and support for migrating customized SAP developments. During this webinar, CAST will present how the Application Intelligence Platform is helping SAP clients in:

• Improving the performance, stability and maintainability of their custom ABAP applications
• Augmenting the effectiveness in ABAP delivery from internal and outsourced teams
• Reducing risk in ECC6.0 migration impacts while optimizing migration ROI through custom code maintenance costs reduction.

Two Webinars will take place: November 8th and November 28th at 2pm

Join CAST for an online CIO dialogue with Paul-Camille Bentz, former branch CIO at Allianz Group

On October 25, please join Paul-Camille Bentz and CAST for this important online discussion and gain insight into proven strategies to run IT like a business.

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of CAST Application Intelligence Platform version 6.0, the latest release of the only enterprise-grade software quality assessment and performance measurement solution on the market today. This latest release combines an enhanced user interface with unparalleled levels of technology coverage so you can gain more visibility and control over the performance of your application development.

Companies measuring their Application Development activities with metrics can see a measurable improvement on the productivity and quality of the work delivered back to the business. This is why many businesses are using Key Performance Indicators, also known as KPIs, to monitor their Application Development organisations.

With complex business applications, outsourced or distributed teams, and new user demands every day, it is vital to put in place processes to gain visibility and keep control over the Application Development organisation. Now you can spot potential problems or maintainability drifts early and take action before they become costly.

CAST is proud to once again be Gold Sponsor of Butler upcoming Application Development and Lifecycle Management Symposium.

The symposium is intended for IT Directors, Chief Information and Technology Officers, Application Development Managers, Enterprise Application Architects, and development team leaders. Key topics for the 2007 event will be:

• Application Development never stands still, technology changes and throws up new challenges - an Agile approach can meet these through its flexibility.
• Global Software Development can provide some significant advantages, but a risk-benefit analysis needs to be the first step as not all projects can be turned distributed.
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an emerging solution to the IT chaos that exists in many organisations - but in order to implement SOA it is necessary to think through the implications for Application Development.

Delegates will also have an opportunity to talk to the leading vendors in the Application Development market, quiz the Butler analysts with any questions, see demonstrated the latest tools and technologies on offer, and will also have an opportunity to network with their peers and colleagues.

We invite you to explore the sources of these software failures during a special 45 minute web-seminar and how to prevent them with the implementation of an automated Application Quality Gate without any impact on the current Application Development organisation.

You are invited to join the discussion as CAST, Forrester Research, CSC, and Wragge & Co. look at best practices in regards to the multi-sourcing of application development and maintenance, including the use of metrics and KPIs for improved relationship management.