Compuware Announces Changepoint 2010

Detroit-based Compuware Corp. (Nasdaq: CPWR) Thursday announced Compuware Changepoint 2010, a major release of its powerful project portfolio management and professional services automation software.

Tailored to meet the needs of today's dynamic and mobile technology workforce, Changepoint 2010 offers new support for mobile devices such as the Blackberry and iPhone while also providing enhanced support for team collaboration, executive decision making and other customer-sponsored usability enhancements. Compuware unveiled Changepoint 2010 at Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit 2010 in London, England.

"Project portfolio management solutions and discipline are valuable in many domains, including product development and professional services, not just engineering or IT," said Matt Light, vice president of research with Gartner Inc. "As the user audience for PPM solutions keeps expanding, vendors are challenged to provide user friendly and intuitive tools in a variety of usage scenarios. I'm encouraged to see some leading vendors emphasize continued focus on PPM usability in recent releases that simplify interfaces and enhance the end-user experience."

Changepoint 2010 represents significant enhancements to Compuware's market-leading PPM system. These enhancements enable customers to close the "consumption gap" -- defined as the difference between product functionality offered and the features actually used by customers. Filling this gap is critical in order for customers to achieve business value and maximize return on investment.

Changes in Changepoint 2010 include:

* Mobile device support. With estimates of the global mobile workforce surpassing 1 billion people this year alone, technology workers continually need more mobile, dynamic and virtualized functionality. Changepoint 2010 now enables remote workers -- such as professional services or product management professionals -- to connect to Changepoint via their Blackberry or iPhone. This enables key remote functionality such as time entry, the ability to access and update assigned tasks and participate in workflow-driven approval cycles.

* Service desk and request management. A key Changepoint differentiator, request management enables users to streamline the ideation and requirements management process and speed resolution of customer support issues. The 2010 release now offers an embedded screen capture utility to enable better analysis and faster resolution of support issues. It also delivers enhanced support for templates associated with specific request-based business objectives.

* Enhanced team collaboration. Changepoint's team folders facilitate collaboration between distributed, cross-functional technology teams including customers, sub-contractors and industry partners. In the 2010 release, Changepoint makes team participation more dynamic by making team folders more universally accessible to all Changepoint users, including third-party users via client portals. Improved search functionality also allows users to conduct quick or advanced search on a folder's contents and attachments. Collaboration moves from the general to the specific with the ability to leverage Changepoint team folders tied to a specific project, application or client. And, there is a new ability to directly launch URLs from within a team folder, which enables users to easily access external applications or collaboration sites.

* Improved executive decision making. Changepoint's scenario comparison functionality helps companies drive investment decisions across their portfolios. It also provides visibility into resource demand as a critical input to decision making. Changepoint 2010 improves this interactive experience through the integration of Microsoft's Silverlight technology. Now users can view resource demand as a critical input to decision making, and visually graph scenarios related to strategic roadmaps and development sprints, while also saving commonly used scenarios, views and filters for future use.

* Usability enhancements closing the "consumption gap." Usability improvements boost customer satisfaction levels, allow users to derive greater benefit from the application's functionality, and, in turn, deliver better value and return on investment. With this latest release, Changepoint furthers its commitment to enhancing the usability through a more intuitive interface design, improved scalability and performance, enhanced data integrity and the ability to add user-specific inline help pertaining to a business and process.

"This is an incredibly streamlined release," said Keith Roberts, senior enterprise systems analyst with QAD, a global provider of enterprise software and services. "We've been in beta with Changepoint 2010 for nearly a month and are very impressed with the release's performance and the new feature-adds and usability enhancements. The road warriors within our 400-person professional services organization are eagerly anticipating Changepoint's new mobility capabilities, which will significantly boost their efficiency, allowing staff to do time entry, route expenses for approval and update tasks from their Blackberry while on the road and on customer site. We also see huge potential in this release's expanded request management capabilities. New template support makes requests that much easier to use, and we're already seeing countless ways for QAD to tap into the power of requests to streamline business processes around the company."

Added Lori Ellsworth, vice president of Compuware Changepoint: "Compuware Changepoint continues to improve the user experience--providing today's distributed, mobile technology workforce with greater value while also serving growing project management demands and more sophisticated professional service functions. The timing for this release comes just after our having been recognized as a Leader in Gartner's PPM Magic Quadrant*. We believe this further acknowledges Changepoint's compelling solution value."

More at www.compuware.com.

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