Cast, which specializes in software analysis and measurement, today announced Rapid Portfolio Analysis, a cloud-based tool that complements the company's Application Intelligence Platform (AIP), which is an enterprise software analysis measurement tool.

TIPS:

"RPA is a cloud-based offering designed to do the same kind of things that AIP does, but instead of looking at one application in great detail and monitoring that detail over time, it looks across many apps in a portfolio and provides a high-level assessment of where the risks exist," says Cast Managing Director of Portfolio Analysis Solutions Peter Pizzutillo.

Like AIP, the SaaS offering is powered by a rules engine that assesses the state of your programs by taking into account software complexity and industry best practices, but it uses a smaller subset of those rules, Pizzutillo says, 14 versus 28.

Even though these tools almost always pay dividends, traditionally companies have been "more willing to pay someone to sit in the corner and flip through printouts than they have been to buy tools for this type of analysis," says Jim Duggan, VP of research in Gartner's Application Strategy & Governance group. "It's one of those paradoxes.