Contact IDC Help Shopping Cart Edit Your Profile
Search
   
Analyst Profile Detailed
dotted lines
Analyst Photo
Melinda-Carol Ballou
Program Director, Application Life-Cycle Management & Executive Strategies

Team: Application Life-Cycle Management
Open Source
Melinda-Carol Ballou serves as Program Director for IDC's Application Life-Cycle Management research. In this role, Ms. Ballou provides thought leadership, expert opinion, research, and analysis through comprehensive research on application life-cycle management (ALM), with specific focus on software life-cycle process configuration and management, software quality, and IT governance software. Ms. Ballou also offers competitive intelligence and consulting on key aspects of the ALM market to service providers, investment firms, and G2000 end-user companies.

Ms. Ballou's research is published principally within IDC's Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) and Industry Insights' IT Executive Strategies (ITEx)service. In addition, she provides special support through a range of custom consulting projects and multiclient research programs.

Ms. Ballou is working collaboratively with other teams at IDC to create IDC's project and portfolio research (PPM) in the context of ALM topics. She is also focusing on ways in which ALM must evolve to support services-oriented development and composite applications. For the ITEx service, Ms. Ballou collaborates with colleagues targeting IT governance as it relates to IT portfolio management, encompassing IT PPM, IT asset and financial management to research and support end-user technology decision-making, organizational and process strategies.

Ms. Ballou comes to IDC with over 18 years of extensive experience in IT research and analysis. Prior to joining IDC, Ms Ballou founded Ballou IT Strategies, an independent consulting company that offered analysis of PPM and ALM, as well as supporting collateral to G2000 end-user clients and software providers. Ms. Ballou also served as Senior Program Director at META Group, and during her eleven years with META successfully established and evolved the software development life-cycle management and project and portfolio management research practices. Ms. Ballou has also held various editorial positions, including Senior Writer/Senior Editor for ComputerWorld, and Staff Writer/Senior Editor for Digital Review.

Ms. Ballou holds a Masters Degree in Professional Writing from MIU, and a BA from Williams College in Philosophy and Music.

Follow Melinda Ballou on Twitter.


IDC Links more

IBM Rational Targets Range of Application Life Cycle Initiatives — from Initial Cloud to Smarter Products and Smarter Software Planning?
Melinda-Carol Ballou, Sanjeev Pal
Nov 2009 - Doc # lcUS22092109      IDC Link
Earlier this year, IBM Rational made a series of product announcements targeting life cycle management solutions as it evolves its overall product portfolio following completion of its Telelogic acquisition last year. Most recently, earlier ...
Targeting Both Ends of the Spectrum: Extending Microsoft Project into 2010 and Beyond?
Melinda-Carol Ballou
Oct 2009 - Doc # lcUS22065309      IDC Link
Last month at Microsoft Project Conference 2009, Microsoft Corp. announced that Microsoft Project 2010's beta release will ship Q4 09 with unified project and portfolio management capabilities and access and data input through ubiquitous Mi ...

Analyst Research more

Driving Quality into the Cloud with SOASTA: Efficiencies of Scale in a Stormy Economy
Rona Shuchat, Melinda-Carol Ballou
Feb 2010 - Doc # 221732      Vendor Profile
This IDC Vendor Profile lays out the drivers for cloud testing adoption overall and analyzes SOASTA, a company that is developing a market presence in the cloud testing domain. This document assesses key success factors includi ...
purchase document
Evolving a Portfolio Approach to ITPPM with BMC
Melinda-Carol Ballou
Jan 2010 - Doc # 221560      Customer Needs and Strategies
This IDC study is one document in a series of IDC Customer Needs and Strategies studies that examine the ITPPM market. This study focuses on BMC's ITPPM offerings, their positioning relative to the overall market, and some of t ...
purchase document
Appearances

IDC Marketscape: Two Views for an IT Project Portfolio Management Product Assessment
Framingham, MA United States
September 17, 2009

IDC IT GRC Management Summit
New York, NY United States
March 25, 2009