BGI is a leading global provider of investment management products and services, managing more than $1.6 trillion in assets for more than 2,800 clients in 52 countries around the world. The company is using Borland Silk products as part of its tools to manage and test its business-critical brokerage applications covering foreign exchange, trading, securities, derivatives and portfolio management.

"Borland was the best overall fit for our software quality needs due to its sole focus on software quality throughout the entire application lifecycle," said Thierry Jeremie, global software testing manager, Barclays Global Investors. "Borland's ability to provide a comprehensive software quality platform helps ensure that our applications are running reliably 24x7, reinforcing the high level of quality the Barclays brand already represents."

Borland SilkCentral Test Manager is being used for management of quality activities throughout the application lifecycle, enabling teams involved in software quality to collaborate, share test assets and leverage resources against schedule priorities. It also provides managers with up-to-the-minute visibility into application quality status and progress against the project plan. This level of visibility enables informed business decisions regarding schedule, resource, quality and risk in application development projects.

Actual testing activities are being carried out with Borland SilkTest for functional/regression testing, Borland SilkPerformer for load/performance testing and Borland SilkPerformer Component Test Edition for the testing of remote components under concurrent access. With these products in place, BGI is expanding the scope of its testing, and software quality processes across its enterprise.

"We're excited that enterprises like BGI are realizing the benefits of the Borland quality platform," said Marc Brown, senior director of product marketing at Borland. "Our customers recognize that quality is not an afterthought and that by instituting a quality solution that provides integration with leading development technologies, a single point of control, and powerful, flexible testing products, the success of enterprise projects -- traditional, web, or SOA -- can be managed from the earliest stages of project development."

In conjunction with the Borland Silk deployment, BGI is implementing world-class quality initiatives to extend quality throughout the application lifecycle. This will enable BGI to:

• Address quality issues proactively, before they impact the production environment, starting early in the development process and continuing throughout the application lifecycle.
• Automate functional and regression testing, ultimately lowering application development and maintenance costs, shortening the application release cycle and freeing up resources to focus on extending quality.
• Reuse test scripts release-to-release with minimal maintenance, leveraging previously created test assets and improving quality with each release cycle.
• Perform comprehensive performance testing to ensure that an application will fulfill service level expectations before it is deployed to the production environment.