alfabet Announces Release 3.0 of planningIT for Enterprise Architecture Planning and Management.

Includes Compliance Management, Business Process Planning, Automated Workflow Features to Better Plan, Manage IT Systems

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- alfabet Inc., a leading software provider in strategic IT planning and management, today announced Release 3.0 of planningIT[R] for enterprise architecture planning and management.

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.

This new release includes several major enhancements designed to help companies plan and manage their IT systems more strategically and efficiently. Significant development effort has gone into building a new Compliance Management module. In addition, Release 3.0 includes business process planning and automated workflows for data collection. It also includes a completely new user interface to streamline use of the tool.

"With planningIT 3.0's new user interface, we can now easily check the current status of planned projects and evaluate their impact on the enterprise architecture," said Rainer Scheibehenne, senior consultant of the CIO Office at WestLB, a large European commercial bank. "With a mouse click, we have the number and type of existing applications, their logical and physical interrelationships and the responsible contact person at our finger tips."

Compliance Management: Organizations today require a systematic approach for defining and managing compliance initiatives through a sustainable and integrated process that is aligned with corporate strategy. Enterprises that identify and assess risk more effectively achieve greater efficiencies in compliance control. alfabet's new Compliance Management module supports the processes necessary for compliance management. It defines control sets, evaluates objects for specific controls and reports and audits compliance projects.

"Enterprises have struggled to meet compliance demands while under a great amount of time pressure," said Erik Masing, CEO of alfabet. "With most companies spending from 10,000 to 100,000 or more hours per year meeting compliance requirements, they need a framework that delivers the relevant data and centralized structures to make compliance checks more efficient. Based upon customer feedback, we have included sophisticated compliance management features that meet these needs."

Other planningIT 3.0 Features

Business Process Planning: Until now, planningIT's major product strength has been in planning the IT support for business processes. alfabet has expanded its core competency to include business process planning. This feature enables strategic planning and decision-making through the evaluation of various business process changes, such as adjustments to business models, product portfolios or sales channels. Scenario versions of business process models can now be stored in the planningIT repository, which traditionally holds all of the information required for IT architecture planning. This means that just as with IT architecture planning, planningIT now provides the same planning disciplines for creating scenarios, evaluating scenarios and decision-support for planning changes to business processes and analyzing the impact of such changes.

Workflow Optimization: In the area of workflow optimization, Release 3.0 introduces wizards for data entry and maintenance. With this, planningIT addresses one of the biggest problems in IT management: having a systematic approach to capturing information in a structured way. Using easy-to-use linear workflows and prompts, planningIT customers can easily perform data entry with little knowledge of the subject matter and the solution. Wizards ensure consistent data capture and a higher data quality in the planningIT inventory on 'commodity' objects such as demands, peripherals, components, devices and applications. Wizards thus optimally support large user communities and enable faster rollouts. They are indispensable in a collaborative work environment as often the information necessary to document an architecture object is distributed over several users

PlanningIT 3.0 is available immediately on a subscription basis (SaaS) or perpetual license model.

About alfabet (www.alfabetinc.com)

alfabet enables companies to see, analyze, control and align IT initiatives with business priorities continuously. Its planningIT[R] 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 15,000 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 AMB Generali, BP, DaimlerChrysler, Deutsche Bahn and T-Systems. Founded in 1997, alfabet is based in Berlin with U.S. headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

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