Ten Thousand Enterprise Developers
Standardize On Eclipse Open Source using Linux
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The Problem
One of largest, most well-known software and hardware vendors in the United States faced a daunting task; requiring ten thousand developers to standardize on Eclipse Open Source-based tools using Linux machines. Under new leadership and direction, this Fortune 50 company considered building their own software delivery mechanism but did not have the desire to "own" and further manage it. The organization also required different teams to have unique Eclipse tool stacks, so a 'one-size-fits-all' technology would not work for this company.

This enterprise further required that a delivery mechanism integrate with existing technologies as all developers are issued a company-wide user identification and password. Thus, the new technology would need to authenticate and work with all other systems in their network.

Technical Details

An additional complication was that internal developers resisted the demands of upper management and did not want to install the newest Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) for a myriad of reasons. However, the leadership deemed that for the organization to remain competitive for its customers and shareholders, it must adopt the newest Eclipse technologies. The transition therefore needed to be seamless and easy for the development staff.

After heavily researching the marketplace for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and software management technologies, this Fortune 50 company decided it needed a tool that is easy to for its developers to use and understand, customizable at a granular level, while also highly scalable and intuitive for future needs. The company decided to use Genuitec's Pulse platform as the mechanism to achieve its goals.

The Resolution
Starting in 2008, the organization began its ALM selection process and tested numerous technologies in a sampling of highly-evolved developer teams to determine which software best suited its needs and goals. Of the numerous teams testing software, it was decided by corporate development teams that Genuitec's Pulse offered the most comprehensive solution to meet their goals.

Pulse was first tested on a virtual machine to see if it was easy to use and understand. With the assistance of the Pulse team, the Fortune 50 developer teams were easily orientated with the Pulse Software and Workspace Center. Different test teams received different "recipes" of Eclipse as would be required if this were a real installation and not a test.

Next, the Fortune 50 developer team needed to know if Pulse could handle a large scale distribution. Pulse allows for the instant creation of Web (or "One-Click") installers, so in a matter of hours, the test team had created installers and sent them to other developers in the organization to test if Pulse could successfully install on their desktops. Without issue, Pulse completed this task and the test developers had checked one more item off their list.

Since this company is a software vendor, they needed to test if Genuitec's Pulse could handle shipping their proprietary software internally. Since each test developer in the company now had Pulse installed on their desktop, the team next sent each member a version of the company software to see if it worked alongside the sanctioned open technologies. Again, without any hiccups, the Pulse platform handled the delivery flawlessly.

Lastly, the Fortune 50 organization would need to know if the deployed software could receive bug fixes, new features and enhancements while deployed on internal desktops. As planned, Pulse was able to "push" changes to desktops so the organization could manage their update cycle.

The company was additionally pleased that Pulse integrated with their existing tools and technologies, and that it authenticated user names and passwords with its internal LDAP servers; this was a major consideration toward cost savings as the company was not interested in purchasing a delivery solution that required the purchase and implementation of multiple new technologies.

The Conclusion
In the end, this public technology company chose to use Genuitec's Pulse for several reasons. First and foremost, it delivered any type of software to their large developer base and segregated certain software projects between teams with permissions and access rights established from the Pulse Software and Workspace Center.

The Pulse platform uses readily-available technologies, so this organization did not have to buy expensive and heavy software installations to utilize a powerful ALM solution. And, after Pulse was installed across the enterprise, they accomplished their goal of moving their developers, stubborn or not, over to the Eclipse Open Source platform so today they remain competitive in the software development and hardware manufacturing business.

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