The package is being announced on Wednesday and ships in approximately two weeks.

Inclusion of portfolio management enables MKS to provide management support for business transformations such as SOA, off-shoring and compliance, MKS said. The new capability, called MKS Portfolios, is connected to the MKS repository. Portfolios is built as an extension to the company's single-system approach to ALM.

"The thing that's really new about this is it is the first time that there's been an application portfolio management product that's integrated into an ALM platform. This is not a bolt-on product," said Phil Deck, MKS CEO.

Portfolio management provides visibility into the software development lifecycle, generating metrics about project status and providing data on the information lifecycle. "It allows everyone who's participating in the application lifecycle to gain visibility into their own [projects] and their team's projects," Deck said.

With portfolio management, businesses are able to make more informed decisions about software processes, such as determining whether an application should be outsourced, said Phil Murphy, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Businesses, which have been saddled with high costs of application maintenance, are able to examine their own software processes, Murphy said.