Well, sometimes it is hard to boil all this technology talk down into thoughts that are understandable to those who do not follow the technology without spending a whole lot of time in doing so. Anyway, here is a quick pass at it.
The job of programming and building information systems involves writing or generating a whole lot of programming code. With today's move toward building increasingly distributed systems, quite often that code is built in very small pieces that must later be assembled together in order to deliver the programs that do the work.
This job of storing, controlling, interrelating, and keeping track of all these pieces of program code is what ISLI's PVCS is all about. There are a group of different disciplines that must be applied to the building , controlling, and management of this program code. Bear in mind also that the development teams who build code are themselves often distributed. That means that the source code that they share must be available to all throughout the distributed locations through a product such as PVCS. That is why there are about a half dozen products in PVCS. The bottom line is that products like PVCS are essential to companies that seek to manage and control their application development process.
Very simply with considerations like the above in mind, ISLI has built a very healthy business for PVCS. However, the majority of that business has been for workgroups, departments, and other units within the enterprise. The opportunity to sell such a product as a standard facility across the enterprise is a mammoth one for which ISLI really needed an additional capabilityin order to widely exploit the opportunity. If you follow ISLI's press releases, they have announced some enterprise deals for PVCS. However, a landsclide of enterprise deals requuires some further technology. And that further technology was acquired with SQL Software.
If one were to talk with a large enterprise trying to control and manage their source code, one would find that the leaders in so doing have applied process management in so doing. That is, in managing and controlling the pieces of source code between all the programmers who may have an interest as well as the many other functional groups that play some sort of a role in that source code as it moves through the steps of being put into production (actual use within the enterprise), companies develop very elaborate processes. Technology such as that acquired from SQL Software can be used to automate these processes. THrough this process of automation, controls can be built in to guanarantee the delivery of much higher quality results. In addition, the actual use of this automation can save the company alot of money, which in the extreme case may even stretch in a seven figure savings. If you think that all of this is not important, remember that many folks within the enterprise are involved with source code while it is being built, or modified, and subsequently moved into production. If just one of those folks makes an errors that is responsible for moving bad code into use then that fault can be extremely expensive. You know, a program error is put into production that results in a $1000 check being written out in error as $1,000,000. Does that sound rediculous ?????? It does happen. And errors of less magnitude are far more common. So, using a product such as PVCS is essential.
Anyway, this is a quick, ad hoc response without any editing. I hope it helps some. |
