New FeaturePlan Modules Bridge Physical and Remote Product Management – Anytime, Anywhere Access Bolsters Productivity and Profitability
Montreal, Quebec – November 13, 2006 – Ryma Technology Solutions Inc., the leading provider of requirements management solutions for the Product Management community, today announced that FeaturePlan On-Demand™ - the company’s unique requirements management tool - is now available as an on-demand, hosted solution. Responding to the need for organizations of all sizes to create a more efficient product management process, Ryma now delivers FeaturePlan™ with the simplicity and cost-effective nature of an on-demand solution. Using FeaturePlan, organizations can consolidate the flow of incoming customer and market requirements into a central database, track requirements through multiple releases and deliver context to developers. FeaturePlan, which is now available as either a hosted, on-demand or via a packaged requirements management solution, is based on the industry-standard Pragmatic Marketing® framework.
Requirements management solutions are gaining in popularity, as software companies seek to operate like other data and research-intensive industries and avoid spending millions of dollars developing products that may or may not meet a specific market need. Unlike other requirements management solutions which focus on development requirements, FeaturePlan enables its users to identify product requirements that are based on actual customer feedback and business drivers. With FeaturePlan, product management teams are able to collect both market and customer intelligence from a variety of disparate sources, analyze the data to identify real-world business needs, define valid product requirements and features and then prioritize them based on business opportunities and their organization’s corporate strategy. As a result, product managers spend much less time on routine data management upkeep, allowing them to spend more time on strategic tasks – and in turn, build products that are better aligned with actual market needs.
Requirements management solutions continue to emerge as a critical way for companies to optimize their product management process, and a web-based tool like FeaturePlan On-Demand provides organizations with a fast and economical way to take advantage of this important technology. Today, organizations are relying upon on-demand services as a means to leverage mission critical applications without the traditional barriers of entry such as budget and resource constraints. For existing FeaturePlan customers, the availability of FeaturePlan On-Demand will allow product management to augment their enterprise application usage and extend the solution to remote contributors for greater productivity and efficiencies.
“As the leading provider of requirements management solutions for Product Management, we are extremely excited to offer an on-demand solution,” said Rene Bellei, President and CEO of Ryma Technology Solutions. “Delivering our customers a hosted solution is an important step in our strategic development as it enables our customers to broaden their use of our leading requirements management software. Now, companies of any size can extend the solutions to partners outside of their organization or geographical location to enable true team collaboration and establish a heightened level of communication among all the stakeholders typically involved in the product management process.”
In addition to the availability of FeaturePlan On-Demand, the company also announced the following enhancements to the FeaturePlan product set:
- Web Access: With the new Web Access capability, product management contributors will now be able to add valuable information into FeaturePlan from any Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser. By providing easy access to a larger number of collaborative users around the world, product management efforts benefit from a greater flow of information and intelligence.
- Microsoft Outlook Add-in Module: Leveraging the new Microsoft Outlook Add-in feature, product management contributors can now push market input into FeaturePlan within the familiar Microsoft Outlook interface. This allows product managers to manage their emails more efficiently and eliminates the possibility of duplicating efforts among contributors.
- License Manager Module: In order to better manage associations between license keys and users, the FeaturePlan license manager capability enables product administrators to display which licenses and add-on are associated with which users.
- Offline Input Module: With the introduction of the Offline Input module, users will be able to work in FeaturePlan while disconnected from the server. When used in combination with the newly announced Microsoft Outlook Add-in Module, users will also be able to push downloaded emails into FeaturePlan while working offline, which will further bolster their productivity.
“FeaturePlan’s new Web Access empowers our entire organization to contribute anytime, anywhere to the ongoing product management process," said David Turetsky, Director, Product Management, Workforce Management for Workscape Inc. "More importantly, since everyone has web access, we are able to quickly and easily deploy FeaturePlan across the organization so that all collaborators involved in our product management process can participate regardless of their geographical location."
Ryma Technology Solutions will feature the benefits on an on-demand requirements management solution in a Webinar entitled ‘Enabling Companywide Product and Requirements Management with the New FeaturePlan On-Demand.’ Guest speaker Rene Bellei, CEO of Ryma Technology Solutions, as well as various FeaturePlan customers will discuss how on-demand solutions can dramatically improve the product and requirements management process across the whole organization in order to achieve greater efficiencies. The Webinar is scheduled for Friday, November 17th at 12:00 p.m. EST. There is no charge to attend.
About Ryma Technology Solutions
Ryma Technology Solutions delivers requirements management solutions for the software product management community through its flagship product, FeaturePlan™. FeaturePlan is based on the industry-standard product management framework from Pragmatic Marketing® and uses a best practices approach to collect and organize market inputs for product management and strategic innovation. FeaturePlan is used worldwide by leading organizations such as Reuters, Autodesk and Trend Micro to gather and analyze market requirements, instantly generate fact-based documents and roadmaps, and support strategic business-critical decisions throughout the enterprise. For more information, please visit www.rymatech.com
