Global Investment Manager BlackRock Partners with HP

HP recently announced that global investment manager BlackRock Inc. has chosen HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) 11.5 with Lab Management Automation to improve delivery of application updates for its investment-management platform, which provides sophisticated risk analytics with portfolio management, trading and operations tools.

BlackRock is constantly looking for ways to improve its offerings and deliver market-leading risk-management and investment tools to its customers. In support of this goal, BlackRock frequently rolls out updates to its platform, which processes more than $12 trillion in assets, liabilities and derivatives each day across more than 160 customers.

The company is upgrading to HP ALM 11.5 to leverage its new Lab Management Automation capability, which automates the scheduling and deployment of application development and testing environments. The solution will enable BlackRock to reduce cycle times and ultimately accelerate updates of the company’s 30-plus applications for portfolio administration, risk analysis and trade execution.

BlackRock estimates that the HP solution will significantly improve employee productivity by eliminating more than two months of labor-intensive, manual work for each application tester over the course of a year.

“Delivering innovative financial solutions that meet the needs of the global economy is critical to our business success,” said Jesus Arozamena, vice president, Automation Test Management, BlackRock. “HP ALM 11.5 with Lab Management Automation offers unmatched capabilities that allow us to deliver high-quality applications that our customers want and demand faster than ever before.”

By upgrading to HP ALM 11.5, BlackRock also expects to:

• Improve time to market for financial-services applications by automating the configuration of testing environments, reducing application-testing times from days to hours using the enhanced parallel-execution capabilities in HP ALM 11.5.
• Enhance employee productivity by automating daily checkout tests for 50 production environments and scheduling tests to automatically run over night, allowing application-testing teams to focus more on strategic activities.

“BlackRock’s ability to provide innovative financial solutions depends on delivering high-quality applications that perform business-critical functions and drive competitive advantage,” said Clive Brindley, Software, HP South Africa. “Together with HP Application Lifecycle Management and Lab Management Automation, BlackRock is able to quickly deliver applications that drive business value by accelerating application development and testing, while maintaining focus on quality.”

The Lab Management Automation capability of HP ALM 11.5 accelerates high-quality application deployment by automating the configuration of real-world development and testing environments, running on both private and hybrid clouds. The solution’s rich integration of real-time production insights ensures the desired performance, functionality and security of applications prior to production.

HP ALM 11.5 is a key component of the HP IT Performance Suite, the next-generation enterprise performance software platform that enables IT management to improve performance with operational intelligence.

HP’s premier Europe, Middle East and Africa client event, HP Discover, takes place Dec. 4-6 in Frankfurt, Germany.