Most coverage of last week’s DEMO conference in Palm Desert, Calif., focused on the snazzy, flashy product announcements. And naturally, quite a few of those undeniably cool products and services are primarily consumer-related. However, among the 68 presenters at DEMO were quite a few enterprise products that will make any CIO’s or IT manager’s eyes light up like a 3-year-old at Christmastime. In this article, I’ll give you a short introduction to the announcements that deserve your corporate attention. (Play with the cool new consumer tools, such as eJamming and video ringtones, on your own time.)

For our online coverage of nearly all of the DEMO announcements, see the Information Collective blog.

Software Developer Tools

Every CIO wishes she could judge developer productivity accurately and use the combined project data to determine whether a development team was on track. One tool that may help is 6th Sense, which lets you find out what your software developers are really up to by automatically collecting software development data. That is, it captures keystrokes and other information from each programmer on the fly, to track how much time is spent debugging, reading documentation, coding and so on; then 6th Sense collates the data into useful reports. The software, which probably supports all the development tools your company uses (from Visual Studio and Eclipse to Emacs and vi), adds a thin integration layer that collects data from the developers’ use of the environment and delivers it back to a hosted server. It shows the active time spent in the development process—both activity and the artifacts worked upon.

Naturally, there’s more power when you drill down on the team to discover such things as flowtime (at least 20 uninterrupted minutes, when people are most efficient) and to compare against averages. (Perhaps Mondays are more productive than Thursdays.) You can learn whether IM is inhibiting or encouraging productivity and compare teams (China vs India): Are they working on what you think they should be working on? This can be a key tool for any application development manager who wants to examine his investment in systems, types of activities that developers are working on, or project lifecycles. As a professional cynic (who knows that developers distrust management), I also contemplate the ways in which programmers may resent this—but overall I’m totally impressed.

As a longtime developer groupie and QA professional, I was personally thrilled to encounter SOASTA’s SOASTA Concerto, which aims to enhance software testing for Web applications—particularly for SOA and Web services apps. Web services and the apps built on top of them usually are made up of thousands of messages with lots of protocols (SOAP, REST, a whole soup bowl full of acronyms), and this tool creates a brilliant interface for creating and running all sorts of tests. It uses a browser-based approach, which is nothing special, but the "Aha!" comes from its mixing board interface; it’ll appear very familiar if you’ve even glanced at Apple’s Garageband. Testers can create unit tests and play them on a time line to control the sequence and timing of tests; they can also navigate test results in a flip-through view. And man, it works, which is a big deal for those of us who don’t visualize the juggling balls of processes very well. If your shop does any amount of Web services apps (and I’m sure you do), you might get as excited as I did. It’s currently in beta, expected to ship in March, and will start at $250 per month for a base package of messages.