David Richards's WANdisco Blog

Unlimited Paid Vacation? Yeah Right!

Published by David Richards on February 10, 2012 in General and WANdisco. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

This week we announced that rather than offering employees a set number of paid vacation days we would offer an unlimited number of paid vacation days. To many this sounds counter-intuitive.

“Doesn’t that mean nobody will come to work?”

“Yes but you don’t really mean unlimited…”

Just some of the common questions / comments I got when I ruminated the idea among friends. But I really believe we are on to something.

OK so here’s the logic. If we really trust and value our employees then this shouldn’t be a problem. We are not running some sort of Dickensian sweatshop where everyone clocks in at nine and is playing solitaire to bide time until the clock strikes five. I was walking back to our UK office late into the evening last week. It was dark but I could see the building in the distance. I was immensely proud to see that of the 3 or 4 floors, only 1 floor was still illuminated. Yes it was ours. Just about everyone was still there. Not because we were paying them to be there, not because anyone was forcing them to be there. They were there out of choice. They are a team that works together to get the job done.

It’s also a wonderful self-regulating mechanism. I was talking with someone from our excellent PR agency the other day about hiring. They ask the question are they “P-L-U’s?” an acronym for “People Like Us”. Now, more than ever, hiring managers at WANdisco will ask this question because for this to work everyone must be a P-L-U.

This is not some sort of fad or publicity stunt. It’s real. Actions speak louder than words: we value actual productivity more than biding time at the office, we trust each other to do the right thing, we recognize that work is not actually at the center of everyone’s universe, we have unlimited paid vacation days!

That Was the Year that Was – uberSVN & All That…

Published by David Richards on December 20, 2011 in WANdisco and WANdisco. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I suspect that I will always remember 2011 as the year when the curtain came down on one of the true greats – Steve Jobs. Great, not just in my world of Silicon Valley techies, but great for just about everyone else on the planet. Even though most of us never knew him we feel like we must have. We seem to use his stuff just about every day.

Apple’s success has had and will continue to have a massive impact on the design of computer systems and products. When we were thinking about uberSVN the very first thought we had was about the relationship between the product and the user. Ten years ago I don’t think that would have been the case. I guess you could call it ‘the pre-iPod days’ (the first iPod was released in October 2001 and was cast as “1,000 songs in your pocket”) before that, according to Jobs, music players were either “big and clunky or small and useless”.

Our customers told us that ‘old fashioned’ ALM was big-and-clunky; and they’re probably right! In many cases they were moving away from these ‘dinosaurs’ to a best-of-breed approach. Like Subversion for source control, JIRA, Redmine or Trac for defects & wiki, Review Board for peer code reviews, and so on.

When we launched uberSVN in April I talked about empowering users by giving them choice. Freedom to choose any combination of ALM tools that best fit the business requirements be it price or functionality, open source or closed source. How’s it doing? In short – amazingly well! To our delight it’s being used everywhere from Fortune 100 companies to the US Senate. I even got my 11 and 12 year-old children to install it on their MAC books – it took them only 5 minutes! Not sure how much use they get out of Subversion – but they did get double pocket money for their efforts! That really is the point of uberSVN. We have made an extremely powerful but complex product extremely easy to use and install by anyone and I think we succeeded in that regard.

We quickly followed-up with uberApps. Another ‘first of a kind’ product with an enterprise AppStore for software development tools. Now, with just a single click, it is possible to install a build & test product like Jenkins or even buy external QA resources from crowd-sourcing vendor uTest. This is another step in making ALM both usable and useful. Anyone, and I mean anyone can deploy these apps without special knowledge, experience or skills.

These products were developed in my hometown, Sheffield. It was our Christmas party there the other week and it really was astonishing to see how quickly we have grown. From a small office where we would “see what happens” we have grown to almost 40. There was a lot of laughing behind hands from my ‘friends’ from the south and lot’s of “ooop north” jibes. Well, in between wearing flat caps and racing whippets, the Sheffield team delivered an award-winning piece of software. uberSVN won 2 awards in the first year of its launch and we have seen almost 50,000 downloads.

Apache Subversion also continues to grow. Subversion is still the ‘King’ of source code management. More traditional Enterprises are turning away from old-fashioned / big-and-clunky ALM for Subversion. And SVN 1.7 (also released this year) has delivered a much-needed performance boost. Throughout the year I have been embroiled in various spats with the Giterons (Git fundamentalists who believe in the inerrancy of Linus) but only this month I have spoken to 3 or 4 companies that tried Git but had to pull it out due to various-and-sundry issues. Much more on that early in the new year, when we might just have a solution for those looking to use Git as more of a client to a central SVN server of record…

There was also some politics earlier in the year when one of our competitors used some pretty underhanded tactics to besmirch our good name. Unfortunately for them it worked quite well in our favor. We are, and always have been a big supporter of the ASF (we are even the only Subversion contributor to also be a sponsor). In fact, at the time of writing, we are in the process of proposing a new project for the ASF incubator. Again, lot’s more on that in the new year.

We also took some steps earlier in the year to solidify the Subversion community by acquiring SVNforum.org. I think we have done a pretty good job of updating the site software, Subversion Liveeradicating spam and generally making the site a useful, free resource for every SVN user. As part of our efforts for the SVN community we also hosted the first Subversion user conferences. Audiences in San Francisco, Boston and London attended “Subversion Live”. We are hosting Subversion Live again later in the year with a extended program.

So 2011 was a great year here at WANdisco but 2012 should be even better. We have several major product launches planned including a new (free) open source defect tracker / wiki, uberSVN Team, uberSVN Enterprise and a solution to the Git/SVN conundrum. In the words of ‘Potato Claus’ (the lead character in my kids’ favorite book from a few years ago) may I take this opportunity to wish everyone Happy Christmas, Kwanzaa, Chanukah, Winter Solstice, and also local and regional winter holidays and celebrations.

Here’s a rather nice pictorial representation of 2011 from a WANdisco perspective (click to enlarge):

Our Free Online Training Continues

Published by David Richards on September 5, 2011 in Subversion and uberSVN. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Our ever popular Subversion training webinars continue today with a course on branching & merging. The training covers everything from “what is a branch?” through to “resolving merge conflicts”.  This is just one in a long list of of our complete free SVN training webinars which established favorites and exciting new sessions for uberSVN that we have just announced. To see details of all eleven webinars in this new series go to http://www.wandisco.com/training/webinars

Here’s the current schedule:

bullet September 1 Branching and Merging
bullet September 22 uberSVN: Team Collaboration & Social Coding
bullet September 29 Subversion Difference
bullet October 13 Branching Options for Development
bullet October 27 uberSVN: Access Control Management
bullet November 10 Managing Subversion Projects
bullet December 1 Subversion Locking
bullet December 15 uberSVN Extensibility

We have also teamed up with CloudBees to show you how to deploy Jenkins with uberSVN. The webinar will be hosted by popular writer Tim Anderson of The Register. Learn how to watch for code changes in Subversion repositories, automatically perform builds, initiate tests, notify users of results, roll changes backward or forward, configure Jenkins to schedule, monitor, and manage external jobs, and perform operations on remote servers. There will also be an opportunity to hear from customers who have deployed uberSVN in production and webinar participants are advised to download Jenkins for uberSVN free of charge through uberApps. This special webinar will take place on Wednesday, September 14 – register now as places are limited: Register Now

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants-WANdisco / uberSVN Achieves the ‘Made in Sheffield’ Mark.

Published by David Richards on August 18, 2011 in Subversion, uberSVN and WANdisco. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

In the 1740s Benjamin Huntsman developed a new technique for producing steel called crucible steel in his workshop in Sheffield, England.  Prior to this, Sheffield produced about 200 tonnes of steel per year.  Move on a hundred years, and, using Huntsman’s technique the amount had risen to over 80,000 tonnes per year – almost half of Europe’s total production.  Sheffield evolved from a small town into one of Europe’s leading industrial cities and England’s 4th largest city.

Sheffield was at the heart of the industrial revolution that started in Great Britain and spread to the rest of the world.

We are truly honored today because we have been given the right to use the “Made in Sheffield” mark in conjunction with our uberSVN product.  Dating back as early as 1297 the Made in Sheffield mark is awarded for high quality products made in the city.

Of course the initial intent of the mark was primarily to recognize the superior quality of the steel products made in the city.  But I’m delighted that the committee recognized that we have a new industrial revolution based on tech.  The first iteration was a ‘faux-revolution‘ – most of the dot-coms really weren’t doing anything sustainable or revolutionary.  But the one’s that survived and prospered really are.  Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer by a country mile, while Google and eBay dominate.  Not so sure about the likes of Boo.com [spent $188m in 6 months and then went pop], pets.com or webvan though.

Machine-based manufacturing in the late 18th century enabled the second, more explosive part of the industrial revolution with the development of steam-powered ships, railways, and later the internal combustion engine and electrical power generation.

A similar pattern is emerging in the tech revolution.  The creation of the world wide web as a pervasive network is revolutionizing almost every aspect of commerce.  This revolution started in Silicon Valley and spread quickly to every corner of the globe.

One of the side effects is that smart companies realize that location alone no longer provides significant competitive advantage.  Code developed in India and China is as good as code developed in Silicon Valley.  We took what some perceived to be a unusual step of moving our software development center to Sheffield a couple of years ago.  I think it’s very strange that so many US companies automatically locate their UK HQ in London or even Bracknell for goodness sake.   The UK in general loves to sterotype and apparently people in Sheffield live like the guys in “The Full Monty”, wear flat caps and breed whippets.  Do people in London spend all of their time rioting and looting shops I wonder?

The move for us paid immediate and tangible dividends.  Our award-winning uberSVN product is “Made in Sheffield”.  It’s terrifically successful with tens-of-thousands of downloads taking the software development tools space by storm.

Being born in Sheffield and coming from a long line of steel people this award probably means more to me than most.  I am very proud to be Made in Sheffield.

Enterprise Software is Dead! Long Live Enterprise Software!

Published by David Richards on July 26, 2011 in WANdisco. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Just imagine if someone approached you with a ‘brand new idea’ for CRM software.  It would cost millions-of-dollars, install in 3-6 months and takes a team of consultants to do most of the work.  Of course you would laugh and rightly so after all it’s such a 2001 idea… How times change.

The idea sounds preposterous now because our expectations have changed.  I can get SalesForce.com up and running and the only real skill I need is to know how to enter a credit card number. Everyone is talking about the cloud and trying to cram the word “cloud” into their new company names as we all did with “.com” back in the heady days of 1998 when the dot com typhoon first hit us.  I think it’s very easy to get carried away, just as we did at the millennium, and throw rational business thinking out of the window.  Back then we forgot that you still actually needed to sell and fulfill orders just like any other business – that doesn’t change.  What does change is the relationship the consumer has with the retailer.  I can’t remember the last time that I purchased an airline ticket inside a travel agent’s office for example.

Let’s look at the reasons why enterprises are moving some software to the cloud. A recent IDC study found the top reason was easy-fast deployment.  The other reasons (see picture below) are associated with cost (less in house IT, pay for use, low monthly subscription) or getting latest functionality.  The converse of this is that traditional enterprise software is difficult and slow to deploy, expensive and complex to update.

I really don’t believe that cloud computing is as revolutionary as the industry would have us believe but what it is doing is changing our expectations in the way in which we consume applications.  Applications do not necessarily need to be in the cloud but they must:

  • Be easy to Install (in less than 15 minutes)
  • Have no special skills to get up and running
  • Be cost effective
  • Just work every time

When we designed uberSVN, we did so with these principles in mind.  That’s why we got tens-of-thousands of successful installs of the product in the first couple of months. So what’s next for uberSVN?  Well we believe that enterprise will take a leaf out of the consumer book.  Almost 3 years ago today Apple updated iTunes and in that update was an app store.  That changed the mobile device into a platform where, with just 1 click you can deploy sophisticated applications for just about everything you need and some things you probably don’t.  Again it’s successful because it’s incredibly easy, fast and cost effective.

Just imagine enterprise IT departments could do this with enterprise applications… enter uberApps.

uberSVN was launched in response to demand from enterprises to be empowered to choose ALM tools to meet their business goals be it price or functionality, open source or closed source.

The concept of an app store means that not only can users get incredibly easy automatic updates and simple (single click) installation but also incredibly fast and efficient discovery of applications.  In a software tools context imagine if you wanted a build engine, a wiki and defect tracker.  There is a plethora of open source, closed source, expensive and free products out there to go and research.   Who even knows if they are all going to work together?

uberApps solves that problem.  The applications are certified to work with the uberSVN platform – that means complete integration and testing by our QA team.  How do you know if it’s any good?  First off you can read reviews from other users and then you can try it out.  Installation is only a mouse click away and if you don’t like it or don’t need it then you can simply uninstall just like you do on an iPhone.

There is one critical difference with iPhone apps though.  There is clearly a balance between fast discovery of applications by users and empowerment to deploy them. uberApps models the process that enterprises use today where departments can request products from IT and then go through a standard approval process.  It’s pretty cool because it means that this is centralized rather than having to get a separate arrangement with dozens of different vendors.

uberApps may be groundbreaking but it’s simply modeling the new way that enterprises expect to consume software today. Which one would you choose -  An app store or a stereotypical software sales guy with his Porsche, golf clubs and Armani suit (all of which you’re eventually going to pay for)?

Hot news coming at OSCON 2011 & a bit of politics on the Subversion Dev list

Published by David Richards on July 21, 2011 in Subversion, uberSVN and WANdisco. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

At WANdisco we have been looking forward to OSCON 2011 for quite some time. Anyone who knows our company will know that we invest heavily in open source projects, in particular Apache Subversion, which is central to many of the enterprise services that we provide. Subversion (SVN) is used by a vast array of users for source code management, from individual innovators to multinational blue chip companies. But SVN is just one of countless potentially world-changing open source applications.

So it’s always invigorating to catch up with a broad spectrum of open source luminaries to share experiences, explore new ideas, draw inspiration and share mutual aspiration. This highlight of the open source calendar is being held from July 25-29 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

This year we are even more excited about OSCON because we have some big announcements of our own. We believe that these announcements in the coming days will dramatically change the landscape of how developer tools are purchased, deployed and used.

In late April we released our own freely available open ALM platform – uberSVN – which has transformed Subversion into an extensible platform, empowering software developers by enabling them to use a wider choice of toolsets, which can be combined to best fit specific business requirements.  The reviews, across the board, have been fantastic; I keep telling people that I have never been involved in such a successful launch.

Also incorporating social coding into Subversion for the first time, uberSVN has clocked up tens of thousands of installations in less than three months and rave reviews keep coming, usually highlighting the ease of installation and excellent usability that the platform provides.

Those attending OSCON 2011 have a great opportunity to win $2,500 by downloading uberSVN from a USB stick being handed out at the conference. We are pretty certain that you will be impressed with the platform whether you win the cash or not! Failing that you can grab one of our cool t-shirts or stickers.

uberSVN was a factor in WANdisco being included in the Red Herring Top 100 North America list and we have been working hard to ensure that the platform keeps up with the expectation of the massive SVN user community and, working on feedback from Subversion users we are now able to reveal some major new enhancements.

Software developers have been keen to find quicker and easier ways to deploy the tools they need and considerably reduce costs at the same time. And WANdisco has a solution…

Interested? We’ll be revealing full details very soon so keep your eyes peeled!

In addition to this major development we have a major partnership announcement looming large on the horizon too! As you would expect from WANdisco we will be hooking up with an organization regarded as the best at what they do. We pride ourselves on the quality, functionality and reliability of the services and products that we supply and we partner with companies who are held in the same regard by users of SVN. The announcement we have later in the week will also herald another significant leap forward for the capabilities of uberSVN!

We look forward to interacting with conference goers at OSCON and open source users around the world that are increasingly discovering the power that uberSVN delivers. Make sure you keep up with our upcoming announcements on this groundbreaking platform and its associated products including training, consulting services and support.

Finally, a bit of politics from the Subversion open source project.  As you may be aware we committed to improving branching & merging several months ago.  With Subversion 1.7 close to release we have been working for several weeks with Andy Singleton and his team at Assembla.  Andy has some interesting ideas that we have been exploring to “fix Subversion merge”.  Frankly the reaction of some and I mean some on the Subversion Dev list is, to put it mildly, disappointing.  If someone new appears with fresh ideas why should the first reaction be a passive-aggressive “no you can’t do that”.  It’s strange how the naysayers all derive from the same place as Harold Evans once famously said of journalism “it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.”  Well we are going to sweat!  We will not be derailed or distracted and our core Subversion guys like the idea so we are planning to build a prototype.  This is something we see as vital for Subversion users. Watch this space!

Q&A With BCW Magazine

Published by David Richards on June 14, 2011 in General, Subversion, uberSVN, WANdisco and WANdisco. 25 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Here’s an interview I gave with Business Computing World (http://www.businesscomputingworld.co.uk/qa-david-richard-wandisco/)

Can you position SCM and SCCM technologies as you see them in relation to ALM in the wider sense?

WANdisco’s heritage is in distributed computing—our technology enables active-active replication over a wide area network. The first application we implemented this with was Apache Subversion to create Subversion MultiSite (a distributed, highly available and scalable Subversion implementation).

Over the past couple of years we have become a very active participant on the Apache Subversion open source project and we are keen to ensure that Apache Subversion maintains its position as what we consider to be the world’s leading SCM tool.

Recently we announced uberSVN an open ALM platform for Subversion. The uberSVN platform is a very easy to use, easy to implement and easy to extend inside a distribution of Subversion. We see SCM as a core component of ALM—it’s where the source code files are stored. So transforming Subversion into a platform that enables you to choose best-of-breed ALM components is a very natural and evolutionary step for us. We don’t believe that any single vendor can provide a complete, best-of-breed ALM solution.

Why would a firm choose Subversion over traditional SCM solutions such as Perforce, Serena or even products from HP?

I guess a better question would be “Why do firms choose or replace traditional SCM solutions with Subversion?” I guess this is because Subversion is open source and hence free, but it performs and scales in some of the most aggressive SCM environments on the planet where some of the traditional SCM products could not. Subversion now has over five millions implementations—how many do the traditional SCM’s have? Not even a fraction of that and that means Subversion must perform and scale in a huge amount of environments.

It sounds like WANdisco’s core technology could be applied across multiple applications. Are you looking at other areas?

Indeed our replication technology is generic and can be applied to other areas. Relational databases is one area we are investigating in our labs right now. Maybe next year we will be in a position to announce something more concrete around database replication/shared-nothing database clustering.

Is WANdisco actively supporting the development of Subversion?

WANdisco is a huge supporter of the Apache Subversion open source project in a number of tangible ways. We have dedicated committers on staff that we pay to only develop Subversion, we are a sponsor of the Apache software foundation and we produce Subversion binary downloads and make them freely available on our website. There was some controversy last year but that was ‘rabble-rousing’ by one of our competitors. The end result is that Subversion development on the open source project is very active again. There is a lot of energy on the project right now and that is good for the wider community.

Are there any clear trends in the SCM space?

Subversion is continuing to gain adoption in the enterprise and government organisations. That’s probably not entirely surprising given that, in product lifecycle parlance, Subversion is in maturity. As I said earlier it continues to replace traditional SCM solutions. I would also say that Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) is also gaining traction and is probably in the number two position. We don’t see enterprises moving their source code to the cloud yet. That may change but we have see some of the tooling move there—just not the source code.

What’s the uptake been like for uberSVN?

I’d say things are looking healthy, we have thousands of installs in just over a month and the feedback has been very good. I have never seen so many product installs and that is a good sign that the product is very easy to install. We worked very hard to get a product that could be installed in less than five minutes and we will never trade that off for anything.

Are there any big announcements scheduled for uberSVN?

In July we are planning a major new product feature that will enable customers to very easily install third party applications. It’s a really cool feature that will change the way ALM software is delivered behind the firewall. We also have some partner announcements around software build and quality tools.

Is GIT a threat to Subversion?

Funny, I was talking about this only today with an industry analyst and he has the same conclusion that we have. Git has its uses but probably not in the enterprise. OK please listen, I know that statement will upset a bunch of senior developers who think that GIT solves everything but it really doesn’t.

If you think about it GIT actually promotes anti-social software development; development in small, disconnected silos is not how software is developed in the real world. Most software is developed by teams whose members have a variety of skills who need to see what each other is doing and that’s the fundamental reason why GIT is not a threat to Subversion in the enterprise. It’s fine for the development of the Linux kernel but that model doesn’t work for most companies.

uberSVN: The Best is Yet to Come!

Published by David Richards on May 13, 2011 in Subversion and uberSVN. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Since the launch a couple of weeks ago the growth of uberSVN has been nothing short of spectacular.  We’ve had thousands of downloads and successful installs.  Probably the only thing to raise our eyebrows a little is the amount of support tickets or to be more precise the lack of them!  I must admit (touch wood) that this is / was by far the best new product launch that I have ever been part of! The feedback (and unsolicited too) has been terrific.  Another well done to the uberSVN team!

It is very important that we don’t rest on our laurels and push forward with new features (such as LDAP integration) and enhancements (which is the posh way of saying bug fixes) and acting on user-feedback.  To that end, we met last week in Napa to sanity check the feature pipeline of uberSVN and our other products.  I think it’s safe to say that the best is yet to come!

We have some pretty big plans for the product.  Indeed the goal from the start was for uberSVN to be a living, expanding product guided by a large community of users.  One of the fundamental early features of uberSVN is the easy to use auto-update mechanism that allows us to offer these new features and functions to users very quickly.

Next week we’ve got a minor release coming out. Here’s what is planned:

  • LDAP Authentication – this has been requested by many users
  • Bug fixes including native language support, loading repos from large dump files.

The next major release will be in late June / early July and we will be announcing some pretty big news at OSCON.  Here’s a sneak-peak:

  • Integration with Subversion MultiSite
  • Scheduling back-up / import
  • Bundling some cool third party tools, pre-integrated with uberSVN.
  • Tool for adding / extending uberSVN.
  • A fully documented API for third party integration.
  • ???? You’ll just have to wait but we have a pretty big surprise up our sleeves!

Partnerships will have a big part to play in the uberSVN ecosystem. We have been working with several leading tools vendors for several months to include them in this new ecosystem and it’s something we are pretty excited about.  We will be opening this up to other vendors after July so if you’re interested in joining the uberSVN ecosystem, drop me a line.

I should also probably address some of the spam comments from our competition friends.  This is not an open source product. Why? Simple, it doesn’t need to be!  We are part of the Apache Subversion project and we believe that Subversion, as a stand-alone product, should continue to be the best SCM product on the planet.  We are going to ensure that uberSVN always uses the latest Subversion Binaries in an unmodified form (our uberSVN users will be able to automatically install the new release of Subversion, 1.6.17, due out next week). In fact we will always offer the open source subversion binaries on our website.  It’s important to us that we always offer users a choice.

It’s a Beta product.  Gmail was in Beta for 5 years. I was one of the early users and used it for banking, my kids’ school stuff and a whole bunch of things that I couldn’t really do without.  It didn’t mean that it didn’t work.  In fact Google only removed the Beta tag when they believed that “the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase.”  In this case we are looking to reach a ‘complete’ set of features – as I said earlier this product is going to get much bigger – in the words of old blue eyes “the best is yet to come!“

Welcome uberSVN

Published by David Richards on April 21, 2011 in New Product, Subversion and uberSVN. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Today is a very special day here at WANdisco.  We are launching a new product: uberSVN.  This is significant from a couple of perspectives.  First, this is a very important product in the software development marketplace and second this product was completely delivered by our team of engineers in Sheffield, England. uberSVN transforms Apache Subversion into an easy to use, install and extend Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform.  We don’t believe that any one vendor has the best product in every class. Why should one be forced to buy only from one vendor?  Shouldn’t you be able to use say Subversion for SCM, Hudson / Jenkins for build, Trac for defect tracking and Wiki? Then decide that you prefer JIRA and simply be able to use it without having to completely throw away everything else.

The message here is that we are empowering users by giving them choice.  Freedom to choose any combination of ALM tools that best fit the business requirements be it price or functionality, open source or closed source.  uberSVN therefore creates a heterogeneous application development environment.

Why can we do this?  Well we are very active in the Apache Subversion open source project and we already support some of the world’s largest Subversion implementations.  Collectively that means that we see the world from two very different perspectives. From the perspective of the open source project we realized that there were certain things that could be improved for the majority of users such as pre-configured apache. From the perspective of our customers, this is something that they are already doing in an ad hoc way.  We just don’t see companies paying huge fees for a soup-to-nuts solution from a single ALM vendor any more.  They want to select from a menu of open source and closed source products choosing what they perceive to be the best in class.  We saw that trend and that was a major driver for us to create uberSVN.  This is currently not released under an open source license but it’s free (that may change in the future).

A few years ago when we decided to open up a development center in Sheffield there were more than a few raised eyebrows.  There’s a kind of intellectual snobbery in the UK about anything north of London and if you mention it then you’ve got a chip on your shoulder (that would be me then!)  uberSVN is a testament to that strategy.  We have a wonderful team that has produced something that is quite brilliant. Well done to everyone on the uberSVN team. You deserve all of the credit!

uberSVN team: Ian Wild, Owain Lewis, Wayne Mellors, Mark Poole, Simon Mann, Warren Harper, Liam Jolly, John Chambers, Mat Booth, Steve Bell, Katherine Sheehan, Gavin Moorcroft, Mark Lucas, Gary Beardshaw, Clare Jones, Andrew Smethurst, Ross Bray

Experian Sees the Light

Published by David Richards on March 17, 2011 in WANdisco. 0 Comments

Experian Moves to WAndisco for "Serious Subversion Support"

I’m really delighted with the announcement today.

Experian moved their open source subversion support to WANdisco. Of course I think they made the right choice and I must admit that they were at the forefront of my mind when I was writing the prior blog post [How to Choose an Open Source (Subversion) Support Provider].

It’s good to hear that we were able to step in and help here:

“We get immediate responses from WANdisco. All we have to do is pick up the phone and our questions get answered”

“With our last Subversion support vendor it was difficult to reach a live person. Everything had to be done through their portal. Response times were slow and most of our tickets were never really resolved.”

At WANdisco we do try and do the right thing. Sometimes that might lead to controversy like our commitment to fix branching and merging.  I’m still not sure why certain people / organizations take such great umbrage to that.  Maybe they feel threatened or even want to distract attention from the real agenda.

Either way I am proud that we are able to provide real, serious support for the Apache Subversion open source project.

On a different and very sad topic the situation in Japan is just terrible.  The number of confirmed dead and missing now stands at nearly 13,000 while some 450,000 people have been staying in temporary shelters amid sub-zero night-time temperatures. We have an office in Tokyo and our friends Tanigowa-san and Yamamot-san and their families are thankfully safe. There’s very little we can do from thousands of miles away but we have donated to the Red Cross – Japan Earthquake & Tsunami Appeal and we have also placed a link in the header of our website.