GitLab’s Infusion

Big news on the developer tools front today.

Forbes is reporting DevOps player GitLab has raised $268M in a Series E round co-led by Iconiq Capital and Goldman Sachs at a $2.75B valuations. That more than doubles the valuation of its previous funding roundThe company is looking forward to a 2020 IPO, and interestingly has expanded in the direction of a no-office expansion (a sizable number of the company’s employees work remotely).

The company’s value prop is straightforward: GitLab helps companies build and release their own software faster, and in a more coordinated fashion (including bringing together groups as disparate as product, development, security, and operations). It offers two options: A free community edition, and a paid enterprise edition.

In a statement about the funding, GitLab indicated its plans were “to make all of our DevOps platform offerings, including monitoring, security, and planning, best in class so we can enable our enterprise customers to continue to bring products to market faster.”

The company claims that more than 100,000 organizations currently use GitLab, and the company’s annual recurring revenue growth rate is 143%, in a market that is expected to triple by 2023 (from $5.2 to $15B).

Gitty up!

Dick’s Sporting Software

Interesting read from The Wall Street Journal’s “CIO Journal” about Dick’s Sporting Goods building all of its software in house:

Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. is betting that building all its software in house, as opposed to relying on third-party vendors, will give it a competitive advantage.

Chief Technology Officer Paul Gaffney is spearheading the effort after taking a similar approach at his previous employer, Home Depot Inc.

“In a lot of retail, there’s been a tradition that tools were designed at headquarters and inflicted on the store [employees]. We’ve been trying to turn that around,” said Mr. Gaffney, who joined Dick’s in late 2017.

In 2019, Gaffney indicates that his staff “will finish the transition to in-house software for all its e-commerce platforms, after developing new software for inventory tracking.”

The eight-person team that developed the inventory software has a self-imposed goal to earn at least 10 times the cost of the team in annual revenue. The goal was set in October and the team is about halfway there, Mr. Gaffney said, adding that he tells his staff: “Don’t get excited about shipping a feature—get excited about when the feature turns into revenue and turns into profit.”

Example: 

Thanks to its tech overhaul, Dick’s is now able to list sports products online within 30 minutes of a major event, such as a championship win or a player trade, Mr. Gaffney said. Previously, that used to take three to five days, he said. “Our ability to do that really depends on us controlling all of the elements of the pipeline,” he said.

The story points out that Dick’s e-commerce sales have increased 17 percent in the quarter ended February 2 from the year-earlier period, and that “transforming the technology group has improved productivity and the customer experience.”

The new inventory software—developed by a team comprising six engineers, a design manager and a product manager—was deployed to all stores in September. The tool provides real-time product information, inventory availability and alternative product recommendations. Ease of use is a priority for all newly built technology, because it helps attract younger talent used to consumer technology products, Mr. Gaffney said. Dick’s is one of several companies who are revamping technology to suit the millennial workforce.

Build it and they will come…and buy.

(Almost) Live From IBM Innovate 2012

I wasn’t able to make it down to Orlando for the IBM Innovate event, as I’m preparing to participate in an annual Watson family rite: My father’s annual member-guest golf tournament.  We won the competition two years ago for the first time, and last year, not so much.

So, this year I’m out for …. well, not blood.  Just a much lower golf score.

However, I wasn’t too busy to check in and watch some of the tidings from Innovate 2012 via the Livestream coverage, then chat about it with mi amigo Scott Laningham, who is holding down the broadcasting fort quite nicely.

If you’re a frequent viewer of our podcasts (or even if you’re not), you ought to get a kick out of my persona: A laptop sitting on the sofa with a picture of me.  We tried to use Skype video to do the back and forth, but the Internet connection on the ground simply wasn’t big enough for my booming persona!

Thanks to Scott and Jesse and the crew on the ground in Orlando for helping me participate. It’s not easy being the virtual me, especially when I cannot decide which pair of shoes to wear!

IBM Expands Collaborative Software Development Solutions to Cloud, Mobile Technologies

At IBM Innovate in Orlando earlier today, the company announced a range of new software solutions that will help clients create software applications faster and with higher quality across multiple development environments including cloud, mobile, and complex systems.

The software world’s push toward continuously evolving systems necessitates consistency and collaboration across the entire software lifecycle and supply chain. Often software development teams are struggling to meet business expectations due to a lack of hard facts.

There is a need for shared data and a consistent context across organizational boundaries, exposed through clear and honest metrics.

To address these challenges, IBM is introducing a new version of its integrated software Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution with extended design management capabilities.

CLM is built on IBM’s open development platform, Jazz, and brings together IBM Rational Requirements Composer, IBM Rational Team Concert, and IBM Rational Quality Manager in one easy-to-install and easy-to-use solution. The new CLM software ensures that software design is integrated with the rest of the software application development lifecycle.

Development teams are now able to seamlessly collaborate on the design and development of software with key stakeholders from across the business.

According to preliminary findings of an IBM Institute for Business Value Global Study on software delivery, more than three-fourths of the participating organizations said they are underprepared for major technology trends that will impact their competitiveness.

These trends include the proliferation of mobile devices, the ability to leverage cloud-based resources for flexibility and savings, and the growing percentage of smart products with embedded software. While 50 percent of organizations believe successful software delivery is crucial to their competitive advantage, only 25 percent currently leverage it.

“Today’s business dilemma is how to address both the need for rapid delivery and sufficient control in the software development process,” said Dr. Kristof Kloeckner, general manager, IBM Rational. “We must balance the need for speed and agility with better governance to manage cost and quality, achieve regulatory compliance, ensure security, and have some level of financial predictability.”

Top Bank in China Transforms Core Processes

China Merchants Bank (CMB), headquartered in Shenzhen, China, has over 800 branches, more than 50,000 employees and is cited as one of the world’s top 100 banks. China Merchants Bank environment spans IBM System z and IBM Power platforms.

With geographically dispersed developers responsible for modernizing core banking and credit card processing applications, collaboration became essential. CMB uses IBM Rational CLM software capabilities to create a multiplatform application lifecycle management (ALM) environment to help automate their development processes and breakdown skills silos for effective cross-teaming.

“IBM Rational Developer and ALM tools were brought into our credit card migration and core banking system project,” said Zhanwen Chen, manager of configuration management, China Merchants Bank. “Replacing older tools and coordinating the efforts of our 1,000+ developers improved our quality and performance.”

DevOps in the Cloud

In a typical organization, it may take weeks or months to deliver a development change, due to infrastructure and configuration, testing and manual deployment, and lack of collaboration between development and operations teams.

Continuous software delivery in the cloud allows customers to continuously and automatically deliver changes across the enterprise software delivery lifecycle, spanning development, application testing and operations. With a “DevOps” approach in the cloud, customers can reduce time to market and automate changes in development, test and production.

IBM is supporting cloud delivery, development and operations with new solutions, including:

• IBM Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management on IBM SmartCloud Enterprise provides an agile cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) well suited for development and test that is designed to provide rapid access to secure, enterprise-class virtual server environments.
• The IBM SmartCloud Application Services pilot provides a pay-as-you-go service that coordinates activities across business and system requirements, design, development, build, test and delivery.
• IBM SmartCloud for Government Development and Test Platform as a service delivers industry-leading Rational tools for government agencies in a highly scalable, elastic computing environment for agencies that want the cost savings of a shared cloud environment combined with Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) security.
• IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery managed beta via a hosted sandbox in the cloud, provides a hands-on-experience of DevOps capabilities enabling accelerated code-to-deploy through automation, standardization of repeatable processes and improved coordination and visibility among development, test and operations teams.
• IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management software provides comprehensive monitoring and management capabilities that enable development and operations professionals to reduce costly troubleshooting. It also provides free resources to focus on developing new innovations and services for customers. With this tighter integration, application issues can be found and resolved faster, but also proactively prevented to avoid future service disruption.

Enterprise Mobile Development

IBM Rational CLM has also been extended to the IBM Mobile Foundation platform for centralized code sharing and distributed mobile application development.

Currently, fragmentation of mobile devices, tools, and platforms complicates delivery of mobile applications that typically have faster time-to-market and more frequent releases.

The IBM Enterprise Mobile Development solution helps teams apply an end-to-end lifecycle management process to design, develop, test and deploy mobile applications while enabling seamless integration with enterprise back-end systems and cloud services through mobile-optimized middleware. The Enterprise Mobile Development solution brings together several offerings that optimize the recent Worklight acquisition as well as IBM enterprise development environments, including:

• Rational Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management
• IBM Worklight Studio 5.0 and IBM Worklight Server 5.0
• Rational Application Developer v8.5
• Rational Developer for System z v8.5
• Rational Developer for Power Systems v8.5
• IBM Application Center 5.0
• Android SDK and Emulator

Green Hat Technology in New IBM Test Automation Solutions

Today’s applications and manufactured products put additional pressures on development teams to find innovative ways to attain agility and increase the rate that software updates are delivered for testing.

IBM has integrated the recently acquired Green Hat technology with IBM Rational CLM to help address the challenges of testing highly integrated and complex systems and simplify the creation of virtual test environments.

New IBM test automation solutions use virtualized test environments and can reduce costs associated with the setup, maintenance and tear down of infrastructure associated with traditional testing or cloud based implementations.

Over a Decade of IBM Software Development Leadership

For the eleventh consecutive year, IBM has been named the number one shareholder in the worldwide application development software market according to Gartner with 25 percent of the market.

Gartner reported that IBM continues to lead in key and growing segments includingDistributed Software Change & Configuration Management, Requirements Elicitation and Management, Design and Java Platform AD Tools, and realized 25 percent growth in the Security Testing (DAST & SAST) market.

Additionally, according to Evans Data Corporation’s Users’ Choice: 2012 Software Development Platforms, for the overall platform rankings, IBM’s Rational continues its reign as the most highly rated overall offering, an honor they have obtained 6 in the last 7 years in this Evans Data survey of 1,200 developers globally.

IBM & Syracuse: Building Critical Software Development Skills

If you’ve been watching any of the Livestream coverage emerging from the IBM Innovate event down in Orlando, you know that skills is a key issue facing software development shops everywhere.  The need for new and changing skills, skills for new platforms and development languages, skills to help pull it all together.

Today, IBM made an announcement from Innovate that it is working to help address the skills issue in a new partnership with Syracuse University intended to help college students build computing skills to manage traditional and new systems in large global enterprises.

As business value creation increasingly shifts to software, the skills needed to tackle disruptive technologies like cloud and mobile computing, particularly for enterprise-class, large industrial systems, have become critical.

Lack of employee skills in software technologies is cited as the top barrier that prevents organizations from leveraging software for a competitive advantage, according to initial findings in IBM’s Institute for Business Value 2012 Global Study on Software Delivery.

And according to IBM’s 2012 Global CEO Study, including input from more than 1,700 Chief Executive Officers from 64 countries and 18 industries, a majority (71 percent) of global CEOs regard technology as the number one factor to impact an organization’s future over the next three years — considered to be an even bigger change agent than shifting economic and market conditions.  

Syracuse GETs Skills

Syracuse University’s Global Enterprise Technology (GET) curriculum is an interdisciplinary program focused on preparing students for successful careers in large-scale, technology-driven global operating environments.

IBM and a consortium of partners provide technology platforms and multiple systems experience for the GET students. IBM’s Rational Developer for System z (RDz) and z Enterprise Systems help students build applications on multiple systems platforms including z/OS, AIX, Linux and Windows.

“Our students need to build relevant skills to address the sheer growth of computing and Big Data,” said David Dischiave, assistant professor and the director of the graduate Information Management Program in the School of Information Studies (iSchool) at Syracuse University. “These courses and the IBM technology platform help prepare students to build large global data centers, allow them to work across multiple systems, and ultimately gain employment in large global enterprises.”

Close to 500 students have participated in the Global Enterprise Technology minor since its inception. Syracuse University’s iSchool is the No. 1 school for information systems study, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report, and serves as a model for other iSchools that are emerging around the globe.

Back To The Mainframe Future

More than 120 new clients worldwide have chosen the IBM mainframe platform as a backbone of their IT infrastructure since the IBM zEnterprise system was introduced in July 2010.

The zEnterprise is a workload-optimized, multi-architecture system capable of hosting many workloads integrated together, and efficiently managed as a single entity.

Syracuse University is a participant in IBM’s Academic Initiative and was a top ranked competitor in IBM’s 2011 Master the Mainframe competition.

As today’s mainframes grow in popularity and require a new generation of mainframe experts, the contest is designed to equip students with basic skills to make them more competitive in the enterprise computing industry job market.

IBM’s Academic Initiative offers a wide range of technology education benefits to meet the goals of colleges and universities. Over 6,000 universities and 30,000 faculty members worldwide have joined IBM’s Academic Initiative over the past five years.

Urgent, Urgent, Urgent…

Excuse me while I just sing out loud to myself for a second:

You’re not shy, you get around

You wanna fly, don’t want your feet on the ground

You stay up, you won’t come down

You wanna live, you wanna move to the sound

You say it’s urgent (urgent, urgent…)

Okay, we’re gonna play human Shazam.

Name that tune!

Need a hint?  Lou Graham?  Singers of “Cold As Ice?” “Hot Blooded?” “Juke Box Hero?”

Of course, I’m talking about Foreigner.  And I’m talking about them not only because they were a band instrumental to my youth, but because they’ll be playing at the IBM Innovate event next week in Orlando.

I won’t be in attendance, but my partner-in-crime, Scott Laningham, will be there and covering the event, and I’m entirely jealous all my colleagues and our customers are going to see Foreigner and I’m not.

You can still register, and if you do, you can expect to select from over 400 technical sessions, some extended technical training with hands-on workshops, great keynotes, a comprehensive exhibit hall, and the opportunity to network with over 4,000 of your peers.

What else do you want?

We’re going to have mountaineers and string theorists among our external keynote speakers, not to mention one of my favorite IBM execs, Rational’s vice president of marketing, Gina Poole.

Here’s just a few of the key tracks you can look to follow while in Orlando: Application lifecycle management. Design, development, test and deployment. Embedded systems and software. Security. Smarter computing with enterprise modernization.

A little something for every developer in all of us.

If, like me, you can’t be there in the flesh, there’s going to be more than ample opportunity to follow the stream from beyond. First and foremost, use the #ibminnovate hash tag to keep track on Twitter.

You can also watch some of the great video content Scott and team will be producing at www.livestream.com/ibmsoftware.

Scott tells me I might even be making a guest remote appearance.

But whether I make it or not, if you’re in the software development realm, I don’t know why you would be anywhere else next week.

Just don’t tell me how great Foreigner was when you get back.

IBM Promotes Collaboration, Reduces Complexity Using Jazz

The IBM Innovate 2011 event kicks into its third day down in Orlando, and the announcements have already started streaming out of the event, as has the Livestream coverage for those of you who couldn’t make it to Orlando.

Today, IBM announced new software that helps organizations collaborate more efficiently throughout the entire software and systems development process.  It allows developer teams to quickly access resources and work across global boundaries through an open, collaborative development environment.

This was a theme we heard consistently in yesterday’s keynote session, the need to be more agile, more collaborative, and increasingly across spatial and temporal boundaries.

Improving the Economics of Software Development

To reiterate the point, just glance through the topline of the latest IBM CEO Study which covered 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide.  Two-thirds of global organizations manage software development teams working in multiple locations.

The study also found there is a growing unpredictability in getting software through development and into is full application within an organization.  More than 62% of development projects fail to meet the intended schedule and 30% of project costs are due to rework and poor execution of requirements.

The new software helps organizations align their software investments with business process and operations across an entire organization, creating stronger linkages between planning and execution.  It’s now possible to tap into talent wherever it is located, quickly accessing resources and include appropriate decision makers throughout the entire business cycles.

Built on Jazz

The new software offerings are built on Jazz, IBM’s open software development platform that supports sharing and interactions among software and systems design and development teams.

New features allow developers to interact quickly; share data instantaneously from any source in the development process and connect teams and development communities in new ways.

• Collaborative Design Management: Enables teams to integrate designs seamlessly with other development tasks and information, such as requirements, code, and quality management assets. The benefits of this approach enhance the traceability of all actions, allowing their impact on the process to be analyzed.  Team members and other stakeholders can review, contribute and change solution designs with complete transparency to every participant in the project.
• Collaborative Lifecycle Management: The IBM Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management helps software development teams improve their productivity by offering an integrated application lifecycle management (ALM) solution to avoid the pitfalls of working in silos with broken communication, which results in project delays, low quality or budget overruns.
• Collaborative Development and Operations:  New technologies, such as cloud computing, workload optimization and Agile development are driving the need for development and operations to work more closely than ever before. IBM has created new integrations between many of its leading software offerings that can significantly assist in bridging the cultural divide between development and operation teams.

Visit IBM Rational to learn more about these new offerings.

And don’t forget to tune in for tomorrow’s (Wednesday, June 8th) opening session at Innovate 2011 at 8 AM EST, whereupon Grady Booch will discuss the IBM Watson technology.

UPDATE: developerWorks’ guru (and my good buddy) Scott Laningham has been very busy talking to folks on the show floor at Innovate.  You can check out his excellent interviews here.

 

 

 

 

Innovate 2011: Smarter Software, Better Economics

Here’s my observation about the kickoff session at this morning’s Innovate 2011 event in Orlando, Florida, the IBM conference focused on smarter software and systems:

The best software in the world is everywhere around you — it helps power your car, your refrigerator, your computer, your travel reservation systems, the list goes on.  And yet, at the same time, when it’s working at its best the best software in the world is hardly even noticeable!

However, its benefits and economic impact should be noticeable and even quantifiable, and therein emerged the theme for this morning’s kickoff keynote session, one we’ve become increasingly accustomed to in these austere times: Getting more value from less resources.

Though many may have become weary of beating that drum, from a software and systems perspective, however, it seems as though there’s still plenty of additional value to be derived in developing complex applications and systems, if only we would change the way we behave and develop them.

IBM executives Gina Poole, Dr. Kristif Kloeckner, Robert LeBlanc, and Walker Royce all highlighted and introduced several during the morning’s keynote to provide demonstrable proof of how large, complex organizations are realizing that value via three foundational practices: Integration, Collaboration, and Optimization.

General Motors Powers The Volt With Massive Software Reuse

Bill Bolander, a technical fellow for General Motors, took the stage to bring the renowned automaker’s case study to life.  GM delivered the electric-powered Volt in only 29 months, a car which has some 10 million lines of code.

General Motors' Bill Bolander explains the benefits GM has realized through more agile software development.

Bolander explained to the Orlando audience that there’s “not a better time to be a systems or software engineer” even in these austere times. GM has 16 development application centers across the globe, responsible for everything from code development for the powertrain to the chassie to HVAC and beyond.

This team  creates a global software product line for use across the GM vehicle portfolio, and those assets now get applied across various vehicle programs.  Because of their integrated, collaborative approach to development GM has seen substantial returns in both time to market and efficiency, without sacrificing quality.

As Bolander quipped, “When you hit the brakes, they need to work.”

That’s certainly how I prefer my car to operate!

As a specific example of the efficiencies, 90% of the software developed for conventional gas cars was reused on the Volt, 80% from their hybrid electric.

The General Motors study was a powerful one in terms of economic value to the organization that practices smarter software and systems development.  But it wasn’t the only one.

Danke Bank: Multilingual, Multicurrency, Unified Development

Danke Bank is the second largest bank in Scandinavi and operates in 15 countries throughout Europe, and according to Peter Rasmussen, the bank’s philosophy for banking and information technology is simple: One platform for all.

They have five million customers, 2.4M of which bank via the Internet, with some 670 branches in 15 countries.

But, in terms of simplification, they use one IT platform for their entire organization.  Though they still spend some $375M on software development every year, Rasmussen explained their their philosophy was “creating more value for less resource.”

To do so, his team adopted the Rational approach to smarter development, evolving their focus from documents and assets to outcome and results, and moving quicker in the market while addressing the big uncertainties earlier in the development process where they could be more readily (and less expensively!) addressed.

What did they learn? Well, as an example, those projects which had an experienced project manager saw a 50% bottom line impact.

They also improved collaboration among the bank’s key stakeholders, identifying honest measures that would help them focus on the right improvements that would matter most to Danke Bank.

Software Development At IBM Software

So, the question might be asked, do the shoemaker’s children go barefoot?  Apparently not when it comes to software development at IBM.

IBM started its own agile transformation in the mid 2000s, where it had 26K developments in more than 70 locations just in its software business.  Starting in 2006, Dr. Kloeckner explained, his team started measuring achievement against development goals and incented them to collaborate and share.

He also empowered them with software lifecycle tools, to help make changes stick and pervasive.  “Tools, not rules” Kloeckner explained.

Revenue per headcount saw a net gain of 15% (how IBM measures productivity), and reduced scrap and rework by 4.5%.  The company also avoided $300M in maintenance costs, and asset reuse shot up dramatically, with the code repository accessed some 70K times per week!

Walker Royce explained the ultimate moral of this story.  Better software economics is a result of measured improvement for improved predictability, and agility for improved operational efficiency.

Thsose organizations who better measure and manage their development process better manage uncertainty, and in turn, drive costs down through more accelerated integration testing and measurement of cost of change trends.

As Royce summarized, “Your ability to respond quickly is a key differentiator.”

Innovate: Smarter Software

Does your company build software?

If so, you should make sure some of those folks tune in or attend the Rational Innovate software conference starting Sunday down in Orlando.

I got an overview of this event on my weekly team call earlier today, and I’ve been known to blog at some of these events.

And I’m sorry to say I won’t be at Innovate! 

But, they have a great lineup of speakers for this year’s event, including IBM Research Chief Scientist Grady Booch, IBM Senior VP Marketing and Communications Jon Iwata, IBM SWG GM Steve Mills, and special guest speaker and innovation extraordinaire, Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segueway, among many other inventions).

And if you can’t be there live and in person, check out the Rational Innovate LiveStream starting on Monday for some of the keynotes.

And as you’ve come to expect from our friends in the IBM Software Group, we’ll have an all out social media full court press.

To keep up with all the action, follow #ibminnovate on Twitter, and also check out the Rational Events blog.