CAST, a provider of software analysis and measurement, has introduced its automated analysis and measurement software for SAP (News - Alert), Siebel and PeopleSoft.

According to company officials, the software has been released to address the growing need for consistent and objective measurement of these popular ERP platforms to eliminate costly customization errors in critical business applications.

In a recent study of more than 30 SAP installations, a large percentage of issues that would normally have gone undetected in functional testing, but which result in serious performance, stability and maintainability problems, were unveiled by the CAST analysis.

"CAST's automated analysis and measurement improved visibility into our SAP implementation and allowed us to hone our development efforts," Klaus Lutterschmidt, chief Architect for BIAC, IT-subsidiary of Vienna Insurance Group, one of the world's largest SAP implementations in the Financial Services industry, said.

"Early in the development cycle, CAST identified the defects and issues that are hard to catch with functional testing only. CAST eliminated expensive and time consuming manual code reviews, reduced long-term maintenance costs and improved developer productivity by ensuring all teams were using defined standards."

SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft are environments where applications require a deceptively high level of customization, significantly increasing business disruption risk.

To manually measure quality is too expensive and time taking. For exposing flaws that cause applications to perform erratically, automation is essential.

The enterprise software vendors, who push customers to upgrade to their latest release levels and the continued demand for new enhancements by businesses, lead to the amplification of these issues.

"CAST has been helping IT executives get control over complex, difficult custom environments for many years," Vincent Delaroche, CAST CEO, said. "SAP, PeopleSoft and Siebel are among the most difficult environments to manage. Our ERP analysis and measurement capabilities dramatically reduce the risk of business disruption and save our customers thousands of man hours in enhancement and maintenance costs."

In related news, German business software maker SAP AG has agreed to buy Sybase Inc. in a $5.8 billion deal that ratchets up SAP's rivalry with database leader Oracle (News - Alert) Corp.