Electric Cloud Introduces First End-to-End Solution for Software Production Management
ElectricCommander automates software build, package, test, and deploy processes
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 3, 2006 -- Electric Cloud today announced ElectricCommander™, the industry’s first enterprise-class solution to automate the software development steps that follow coding -- namely the build, package, test, and deploy processes. ElectricCommander joins Electric Cloud’s current products, ElectricAccelerator, which accelerates build and test steps by 10-20X, and ElectricInsight, which provides visibility into the software production process for diagnostic purposes, to complete the industry’s only end-to-end solution for software production management (SPM).
“Software should not be such a production,” said Mike Maciag, CEO of Electric Cloud. “While companies have enjoyed great benefits from front-end IDE’s, test suites, and SCM tools, the back-end tasks of software development have been characterized by homegrown systems that are too slow, too brittle, and too hard to understand. We are thrilled to announce the first and only suite of products for software production management. Starting today, leading organizations will no longer need to tolerate the opaque back-end of software development that slows time to market and stifles developer productivity."
"More often than not, a few developers own the production process, creating and maintaining volumes of scripts that are difficult to decipher and, as a result, nearly impossible to optimize," writes Carey Schwaber in the February 2006 Forrester Research report entitled Reining In Runaway Builds. "When scripting is entirely manual, it’s easy for it to become a source of software defects -- especially as increasingly componentized software requires increasingly complex builds. All around, software builds are ripe for repair."
ElectricCommander addresses this complexity by automating the software production process. It makes the typically manual software build, package, test, and deployment tasks more repeatable, more visible and more efficient. ElectricCommander is a Web-based solution based on a highly scalable three-tier architecture. This architecture allows development teams to easily define, modify, and re-use software production processes across products, teams, and geographies. ElectricCommander provides the reporting and visibly teams need to support compliance efforts, enables the rapid iteration demanded by agile software development and the flexibility to suit any organization’s unique processes and workflows.
Realizing the complexity of its build and test environments was increasing dramatically over time, LSI Logic chose to bring the ElectricCommander product into its fold, based on its past successes with ElectricAccelerator and ElectricInsight.
"As the complexity of our build and test systems increased, it quickly became apparent that our former solution was not only too brittle, but couldn’t scale to handle our intricate test matrix," said Laurent Brack, Senior Software Manager at LSI Logic. "Business demands require that we have an environment that will scale to manage any size project while balancing jobs properly over heterogeneous resource pools. Electric Cloud went above and beyond this task and not only made our procedures more flexible and reusable, but has also allowed us to upload build and test statistics. ElectricCommander is a simple yet brilliant system."
ElectricCommander Advantages
Unlike traditional build management tools, ElectricCommander is the first truly enterprise-class solution, allowing customers to:
Manage Projects of Any Size: While simple to set up and use, ElectricCommander scales to support the largest and most complex build and test processes. Only ElectricCommander’s multi-threaded Java server provides efficient synchronization even under high job volume.
Share and Reuse Project Assets: ElectricCommander’s unique information architecture groups items in virtual projects and each item is stored with metadata that makes it simple to identify assets or procedures for reuse. Shared assets and reuse makes individual teams more efficient by eliminating duplicate work, and gives organizations the power to deploy cross-company standards.
Make Processes Transparent and Repeatable: ElectricCommander’s unique analytics provide valuable insight into the details of production jobs, not just success of failure. After each step in a process completes, a postprocessor is invoked to extract information from the step’s log file -- this information is kept as persistent properties, providing easy access to diagnostic information.
Optimize Without Reengineering: Unlike other solutions that require engineering teams to learn new languages and processes, ElectricCommander is easy to adopt and roll out across teams with a highly interactive Web interface and simple techniques for migrating existing scripts.
ElectricCommander will be available in Q4 2006.
About Electric Cloud
Electric Cloud provides software production management solutions that accelerate, automate, and analyze the software development tasks that follow the check-in of new code. These include the software build, package, test, and deploy processes. The company's patented and award-winning solutions improve productivity in the face of increasing product complexity and time-to-market pressures for software delivery. For customer inquiries please contact Electric Cloud at (650) 968-2950 or http://www.electric-cloud.com.