Black Duck Blog

Bill McQuaide
Executive Vice President of Products and Services
bmcquaide@blackducksoftware.com

Recently I met with the enterprise architecture team at a global financial services firm headquartered in NYC. The company is organized along a number of large, independent business units. Given the relative autonomy of the business units, it’s not a surprise that the organization has suffered from a proliferation of applications (there are thousands), as well as the software components used to build the applications. Much of the code was built in silos with minimum re-use within and across development organizations. And like developers around the world, they’ve leveraged a large amount of open source but don’t have an inventory of what’s used, where, nor good controls for monitoring and updating it.

In the meeting they described how the financial crisis and the economic downturn forced a reduction in the applications development staff. During better times, code proliferation and redundant development were inefficiencies that could be tolerated. But with the recession, they’ve been forced to reduce staff and budget, causing them to re-evaluate their software development and management practices. As the saying goes “necessity is the mother of invention.”

To keep up the pace of innovation with fewer staff, they set out new development goals: drive standardization and re-use of internally developed software, broaden the use of open source for time to market and cost reasons and put a better software management infrastructure in place. They quickly determined that to accomplish these goals would require automation technology. They are in the process of evaluating the Black Duck Suite to: 1) Drive standardization through creation of an OSS catalog, 2) create an efficient way to facilitate re-use of internally developed software and open source, 3) discover what open source is used through out the firm, , and 4) implement and automate an approval process for using new open source components.

This company’s challenges – fewer resources, but continuing pressure to innovate — and their goals are common themes we hear from our customers. We think we can help them with our solution and know-how for multi-source development using open source components. What’s going on in your shop? How do you manage these challenges?