The Systems development life cycle (SDLC), or Software development process in systems engineering, information systems and software engineering, is a process of creating or altering information systems, and the models and methodologies that people use to develop these systems.
In software engineering the SDLC concept underpins many kinds of software development methodologies. These methodologies form the framework for planning and controlling the creation of an information system: the software development process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_Development_Life_Cycle

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a continuous process of managing the life of an application through governance, development and maintenance. ALM is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_lifecycle_management

SLDC is focused on “Software” in development; its what you follow going from one phase of software development to the other; i.e. from scope & requirements to design to code to etc…

ALM is more than “Software”; its the interactions between various functions/teams that follows the life of the application; i.e. from support to development, development to QA or how things come in from clients as defects and end up becoming enhancements for future releases and so on….

There is a ton of stuff out there on SDLC; my next post will be on ALM and how one can setup workflows and events (there are tools out there that can help you) to automate and mange the ALM processes.