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As with many areas of technology the software change and configuration management market, relatively stagnant for decades, is rapidly changing beyond all recognition.
Traditional SCCM vendors such as IBM Rational, Microsoft and Serena are finding that their traditional product set is no longer fit to meet the challenge of modern software development methods and while they race to create and promote new, lightweight, fast and user friendly solutions they find themselves competing not with each other but with a new type of software product – open source.
Traditional SCCM solutions are deeply entrenched in the majority of large software development organisations. Choosing to move the development infrastructure to a new SCCM solution is not a decision to be taken lightly, the migration effort is significant, some elements may get left behind in the process and on top of the technical headaches there are aspects such as staff training and short term loss of productivity to consider however, there is one factor that organisations are increasingly finding difficult to ignore... cost.
Cost not only shows itself in the substantial annual license fees but in administration and support staff, productivity, reliability and performance. Saving a few minutes on each software checkin does not at first sound like much but consider multiple checkins per day for each developer, teams of many developers and the average 10 year life of an SCCM product and you've got some pretty serious time savings.
Companies are trialling SCCM open source solutions by using them for small or short term projects which either don't need to integrate with the larger company solutions or can be merged with the central code set at a later point. Open Source solutions allow companies to provide smaller projects with the same process, rigour and control used for larger programmes in a rapid fashion with low administration overhead... why do I need to find space on an expensive server and wait for a vendor to supply license keys when I can just set up an open source repository on the machine of the development team lead right now?
Companies are also finding that open source SCCM products are more popular with the developers in their organisation than the current organisational standard... that means happier workers (they finally believe the managers are really listening and are not going to waste company budget on solutions which make developers lives more difficult), and developers are following best practice (which equals less people trying to work around it to save themselves time and avoid a complicated tool). Essentially the tool set is being endorsed from the team on the ground as well as having significant and tangible benefits for the management team.
Subversion is one such open source configuration management solution which has rapidly grown in popularity (a recent Forrester survey stated that over one-third of developers were using Subversion as their primary software configuration management tool). This is mainly because it is easy to download, install and start using, essentially you don't need to get budget authorisation, you just need an internet connection.
Open Source SCCM Solutions are nearly 50% of total market share and while Subversion is the current share leader, it's not the only open source option when you consider Git, Mercurial and CVS. Git is the solution of choice for distributed software development and in fact the only choice for linux based applications such as the Google mobile phone platform 'Android'.
Open source is also putting an end to the “home-built” SCCM systems... why spend precious development time creating a bug-ridden, feature light configuration management solution when something already exists which will meet your requirements and far more?
If you would like help understanding how you can migrate from an existing SCCM strategy that is reaching end of life to an integrated solution which is agile, performant, feature rich and significantly lower cost, then contact Clearvision.
Clearvision are authors of the Application Lifecycle Management product UCM4SVN (and UCM4Git) a browser based product which integrates with your open source configuration management solution to reduce the complexity of the underlying tool while providing clear and robust processes for Developers (enforcing best practice) and detailed progress reports for management. It also integrates change management and source code review tools.
Clearvision provide help, advice, training, eLearning and consultancy for the leading SCCM open source solutions. |
