Looking to sharpen its business focus, Compuware this week launched its "Compuware 2.0" campaign, which is being characterized by the 35-year-old software tools vendor as a rebirth of the company.
With Compuware 2.0, the company will evaluate its product list and emphasize business value in its solutions. "There's a marketing component [to Compuware 2.0], but in its simplest for [it is] a recommitment in the focus," on economic value for customers, said Jason Vines, senior vice president and chief communications officer at Compuware.
The goal of Compuware 2.0 is corporate growth; the company has been growing at about 10 percent per year and remains profitable, but that has not been enough, according to Vines. A higher corporate profile also is sought.
"Beyond our client base, we're not that well-known even though we've been around for 35 years," Vines said.
Compuware officials will deploy the "chasm" process to drive economic value from its products. Resources will be put behind product areas where Compuware is competitive or better. But some solutions will be discontinued, such as the OptimalJ Java development environment. OptimalJ has been lacking in that is has not offered repeatable processes at different user sites.
"We are supporting it with our current clients; we are not going beyond [this base of user]," said Vines.
As part of Compuware 2.0, the company plans to focus more on IT services and leverage its Vantage offering for service management. More resources will be devoted to the company's ChangePoint software for IT portfolio management as well. Compuware will emphasize products like Covisint, which is a SaaS-based collaborative portal that will be the subject of an upcoming IPO.
Additionally, Compuware is citing differentiation with its products in the quality assurance testing space including QADirector, TestPartner and Optimal Trace.
The company has no plans to de-emphasize the mainframe platform as part of Compuware 2.0.
Also part of Compuware 2.0 is a new logo and company tagline: "We make IT rock around the world."