Dynamsoft SourceAnywhere Hosted Closes the Gap for Distributed Development Team at Adea International

Systems development and integration leader, Adea International, Inc., assists companies by leveraging technology to address their business challenges. Adea's adaptable Global Engagement Model (GEM) provides clients with the flexible ability to improve business performance. Furthermore, Adea's CMMi Level 5 and BS- 7799 certification ensures that they follow the best practices in serving customers and maintain a high level of information security. Some of Adea's customers include leaders in retail, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, communications, and government sectors. With its two largest offices in Dallas and Bangalore, Adea maintains more than 450 professionals across various locations in Europe, USA, and China supporting global delivery.

The Need

Steve Hall, U.S. Regional Director of Professional Services at Adea International, is the architect behind Adea's CaseBridge product. CaseBridge is the mobile framework allowing state government revenue departments the ability to make their field tax collection more productive and increase revenue. Implementing CaseBridge requires a varying degree of customization and integration development based on the agency's requirements, supporting systems and infrastructure.

Because each deployment is significantly different on an agency by agency level, Adea needed to be able to support those customizations. Hall reflected, "We needed assistance with software versioning and source control which helps us support CaseBridge long term in each unique deployment."

"The speed of our existing source control system was certainly the real barrier in our distributed development environment. There were times, if we had a critical project date to meet, we would fly everybody to the same city in order that they work side by side on a local network. That was the only way we could eliminate the speed bottleneck of our source control system when we were doing high volume check in and check out of files," revealed Hall.

Adea needed a reliable, fast and secure version control system which could integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio.

After conducting a Google search and evaluating several products, Hall decided to evaluate SourceAnywhere Hosted. "I wasn't convinced that we would be able to manage the hosting ourselves, as required by other solutions, and have the performance we required. When Dynamsoft's hosting offering came around, I jumped on that to determine if it would make a difference for us. It did. The performance increase was enormous and welcomed by the entire team," Hall commented.

The Solution: Dynamsoft SourceAnywhere Hosted

Dynamsoft SourceAnywhere™ Hosted, which is delivered over the Internet as a Software as a Service (SaaS) application offers SourceSafe style version control capabilities for development teams. The SaaS delivery model offers unique advantages for development teams from simplified IT infrastructure to lowering total cost of ownership and increasing cost predictability. SourceAnywhere Hosted is based on Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003, SQL Server™ 2005 technologies and Dynamsoft's powerful core. Resembling the VSS user interface,SourceAnywhere Hosted eases the transition to the highly reliable SaaS delivery model and scales to deliver high performance regardless of the size of development team.

Remote Members Speed Ahead

Before using SourceAnywhere Hosted, the Adea development team found downloading the existing code base to a fresh machine through a remote connection could involve up to four hours. "We are now able to bring up a new development environment in about 10-15 minutes – maybe less," added Hall.

Another significant measurement for Adea was how long each transaction took between checking-in and checking-out a file. Hall explained, "To a developer, anything that gets in the way from their thought process in developing code greatly inhibits their ability to be productive. The difference between using SourceAnywhere Hosted and our previous tools is that it has allowed our developers to continue in their flow, continue to be productive."

Since implementing SourceAnywhere Hosted, check-in and check-out time drains have drastically shortened. "Working with slow source control systems is a process deterrent," stated Hall. "We no longer face the long lag-times of refreshing our code base. We are working with the most recent version of each module which eliminates code conflicts and speeds development."

Regarding user experience Hall maintained, "SourceAnywhere Hosted integrates seamlessly into our development environment. It is reliable and we've had zero downtime using it," said Hall. Hall's team reaction to the product has been positive. Hall added, "I hoped to take reliability and security for granted because we need it to be 100 percent. And it has been."

"I would receive source control issues from our development team each and every week. My frustration level was extremely high. Since our team started using SourceAnywhere Hosted, I no longer hear these complaints. When I asked our developers their thoughts on the product, their feedback was overwhelmingly and uniformly positive," commented Steve Hall, U.S. Regional Director of Professional Services, Adea International, Inc.

About Dynamsoft

Dynamsoft Corporation is the leading developer of version control and issue tracking software. Many Fortune 500 companies including HP, IBM and Intel use Dynamsoft solutions for version control, issue tracking.

About SourceAnywhere Hosted

Dynamsoft SourceAnywhere Hosted™ is the hosted SourceSafe style version control solution.