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Electric Cloud Conquers 25 Year Problem in Software Development: Eliminates Nightly Builds

Electric Cloud, the software build infrastructure company, today announced the commercial availability of the first software build accelerator in 25 years to dramatically speed software builds -- Electric Cloud 2.0.

Electric Cloud Conquers 25 Year Problem in Software Development: Eliminates Nightly Builds

-- Electric Cloud’s Software Build Accelerator Speeds Up Builds 10 – 20X --

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA October, 15 2003 – Electric Cloud, the software build infrastructure company, today announced the commercial availability of the first software build accelerator in 25 years to dramatically speed software builds -- Electric Cloud 2.0.

Electric Cloud 2.0 accelerates the build process in software development by ten to twenty times, virtually eliminating the typical long and overnight build process.

Electric Cloud 2.0 is the first commercially available software build accelerator from the company. Electric Cloud 1.0 has been deployed in successful pilot projects in several large Silicon Valley technology firms in 2003.

“Electric Cloud tackles the single most universally frustrating and costly sticking point in software development today,” said John Ousterhout, Electric Cloud CEO and President. “With Electric Cloud, software development teams can now significantly reduce the time they waste waiting for builds to finish, and shorten the overall development cycle. As it stands many builds can take over eight hours to complete. With Electric Cloud those hours literally shrink to minutes.”

In one commercial application, Electric Cloud reduced a four and one half hour build to 13 minutes.

To put the time savings in context, Ousterhout explains the huge impact that Electric Cloud can make to a software development organization.

“If every engineer in a 100-person team can save only 1 hour per week with Electric Cloud, that organization will, conservatively, save $500,000 in productivity annually,” Ousterhout said. “That’s time better put to work fixing bugs or adding features.”

The Product
Electric Cloud 2.0, an enterprise software product that runs on industry-standard hardware, is for medium-to-large software development teams unhappy with ever increasing build times. At the core of Electric Cloud 2.0 is Electric Make, which is plug-compatible with existing Make-based build infrastructures, so it can be rapidly deployed with little or no change to existing tools or environments.

Electric Cloud 2.0 accelerates builds 10 – 20 times by distributing the software build in parallel across clusters of inexpensive servers. It scales to accommodate additional servers for even more performance and throughput.

In order to ensure that parallel builds will not break, Electric Cloud has developed a patent-pending dependency management system that captures perfect dependency information by monitoring all files accessed during a build. Electric Cloud 2.0 records and re-uses build dependency information, minimizing the Makefile maintenance required to achieve and maintain build performance.

“Builds are an integral part of the software development process. In creating Electric Cloud 2.0 we wanted to ensure that our builds were not just fast, but 100 percent accurate,” added Ousterhout. “Electric Cloud 2.0 eliminates build problems due to missing or incorrect dependencies, and that is invaluable to a development organization.”

Pricing
Pricing for Electric Cloud 2.0 begins at $50,000 for a cluster with 10 CPUs.