Artifact Merges Project Portfolio & Lifecycle Management

Artifact releases major upgrade to its market leading SaaS Lighthouse product. The new 5.0 release, code-named Vancouver, provides software professionals with powerful new project & portfolio management capabilities that are completely integrated with Lighthouse's broad set of lifecycle management features. The new release is free for 1 project and 5 users.

Columbia, MD (PRWEB) January 9, 2009 -- Artifact Software, Inc., today announced that it has added Project & Portfolio Management (PPM) to its market leading SaaS Lighthouse product. The new 5.0 release, code-named Vancouver, provides software professionals with powerful new PPM capabilities that are completely integrated with Lighthouse's broad set of lifecycle management features. Blending together both PPM and lifecycle management capabilities into a single online project workspace is a powerful combination ideal for the virtual software teams that now dominate the technology landscape.

Hundreds of companies and thousands of users all over the world use Lighthouse for software projects because it gives them the power to produce desired results. By bringing together software project tools and data into a single, integrated workspace, teams using Lighthouse benefit with real-time traceability and project metrics, efficiently collaborate, and are able to quickly identify and correct risk factors before they have a severe impact on project budgets, schedules and quality.

Lighthouse user, John Leech, Vice President Technology & Application Development at Thomson Reuters (NYSE:TRI), the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals remarked, "our software projects require us to manage requirements, changes, testing, defects, and of course, tasks, schedules and resources. Bringing together both PPM and lifecycle management capabilities into a single product at an affordable price is long overdue, and will help any software team work more effectively together."

Wayne Moore, Project Manager for Aegon (NYSE:AEG) one of the world's largest providers of insurance and investment products, added, "software projects are full of cost, schedule, quality and scope challenges. Solutions like Lighthouse that bring critical PPM and lifecycle management capabilities together in a single system help make those challenges manageable."

Virtual teams using Lighthouse span the globe, and include teams in IT services firms, enterprise IT departments, government agencies, software companies and product companies building software to embed in the products they manufacture. These firms use Lighthouse on a variety of software projects such as commercial application deployments for products from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and others, product development, custom system development and deployments, and web and commerce site projects.

We built Lighthouse from the ground up to be highly customizable so our solution can adapt to a variety of software projects and processes," commented Artifact's Chief Technology Officer, Paul Martin. "Lighthouse's highly scalable, multi-tenant architecture leverages the latest technology such as Ajax, Service Oriented Architectures, Open Source, and Virtualization, to deliver a state-of-the-art product at an affordable price. By combining advanced SaaS and virtualization technologies with true low total cost of ownership, we are delivering a powerful software project platform to the mass market."

Lighthouse is available on-demand both in free and subscription editions, and as a virtual appliance exclusively as a subscription. Pricing starts at $25 per user/month. Read more about Lighthouse or start using it now for free, by visiting the company's web site at http://www.artifactsoftware.com.

About Artifact Software
Artifact provides software products and services that transform software projects into a manageable and predictable business process. Artifact's Lighthouse is an online project workspace for virtual software teams. It enables the management of project planning, tasks, resources, requirements, testing, defects, change requests, issues, timesheets, and other software project data with a single, affordable and customizable solution.

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