source{d} has made available an enterprise edition of its software development lifecycle (SDLC) platform that includes visualization and analytics tools along with additional management capabilities. A free community edition of the core source{d} platform, which is stripped of most of the enterprise-class tools, also is now available in beta.
Company CEO Eiso Kant said the enterprise edition of source{d} provides the additional tools enterprise IT organizations require to employ the platform as the equivalent of a business intelligence (BI) application for managing DevOps processes.
The tools can launch queries against a big data repository based on the Apache Spark in-memory analytics engine running on a Kubernetes cluster, which can be populated with actual data or metadata pulled from multiple DevOps tools and platforms. That capability enables IT leaders to then query data that has been joined together in a way that surfaces actionable intelligence, said Kant.
source{d} Enterprise achieves that goal by including Apache Superset, an open source business intelligence web application. The platform also can be extended to support SQL queries launched from other BI tools and project management applications. The enterprise edition also provides access to advanced queries and user-defined functions to address tasks such as code duplication analysis or identity matching.
Finally, source{d} Enterprise provides authentication integration with LDAP and OpenID to limit who can edit or view queries, data sources, charts and dashboards.
Longer-term, source{d} plans to leverage predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms more aggressively as the amount of SDLC data that gets collected by enterprise IT organizations increases.
Kant said many enterprise IT organizations have tried and failed to build the equivalent of source{d} platform mainly because bringing together and then maintaining all the required technologies often becomes too complex an undertaking. Those efforts also have been confined largely to managing processes such as bug fixes versus including all the BI tools needed to manage software development in a way business and IT leaders can align technology initiatives to specific business goals, he said, noting the source{d} approach brings together enabling technologies such as Spark and Kubernetes to enable IT organizations to deploy an SLDC platform on-premises or in a public cloud.
As software development increasingly grows more complex, the days when it could be managed efficiently through a project management application alone have come to an end. At the same time, more organizations realize their success ultimately comes down to how consistently they can deliver a high-quality application experience. For all the hype surrounding digital business process transformation, the core tenet is that most organizations are indeed becoming software companies. As such, they need to borrow many of the SDLC processes that successful software companies employ routinely. The only real difference is they don’t need to develop those processes from the ground up when more turnkey SDLC platforms are emerging.
— Mike Vizard
