ASCO Numatics choosing SourceAnywhere Standalone

The Netherlands, 21 December 2011

Introduction

With a revenue of approx. 21 Billion USD, owning about 100 different different companies (e.g. Bettis, El-O-Matic, Branson, Control Techniques, Fisher-Rosemount, Liebert, Leroy-Somer, Copeland, Brooks, Micro Motion, ASCO Numatics etc. ) and approx 130.000 employees worldwide, Emerson is a diversified and one of the largest global manufacturing companies that brings technology and engineering together to provide innovative solutions to customers through its network power, process management, industrial automation, climate technologies, and tools and storage businesses.

Our company ASCO Numatics is one of the Emerson brands in their Industrial Automation division. ASCO Numatics is developing, manufacturing and selling valves and pneumatic products to deliver Fluid Automation Solutions all over the world with approx 5000 employees, production plants and sales offices.

Global Engineering Systems

We have a team with .NET, Sharepoint & Labview developers as well as SQL DBA and PLM Admins, all located in India, Lithuania and the UK. It is our responsibility to connect a variety of business systems to provide information to the organization that is normally not accessible OTB.

Speed

To deliver projects and therefore applications & solutions in time, speed is a very important factor, not only from a timeline perspective but maybe even more from a user perspective. Our developers were using Microsoft Visual Sourcesafe for approx. 4-5 years now, but we found the performance to be less than adequate in our particular WAN/VPN environment.

Especially the last year, due to the increasing WAN traffic, performance became so bad that I discovered that people were sometimes using workarounds to deploy and manage code outside VSS. This made me realize that we needed a different solution quickly without much hassle.

Selection Process

While looking on the market for other solutions by using Google and s/w developer forums, we found a few alternatives for VSS, some freeware, others paid. Problem with most programs was that they were doing much more than managing programming code, and providing project management features, task management etc. But all of this functionality was already done with other software we already own/use. What we needed was a simple solution, that could work over the WAN, that was interesting from a pricing standpoint and with as less downtime as possible to get it implemented. A must have was an option to import our existing data from VSS since the VSS database is storing its files encrypted on disk. I quickly found Dynamsoft Anywhere Standalone and while doing a quick comparison with the other solutions we found, I knew that this was the best candidate we could get, but we first had to test it. We chose the standalone version so we could obsolete our VSS product completely, we liked the architecture of the SQL db based Standalone version more than the SourceAnywhere for VSS solution which still uses VSS as the source db.

Piloting the Software

I reviewed the Dynamsoft website which was very logical setup and summarized the features of the program to our users currently using VSS very clearly. We decided to test the program for 2 weeks and downloaded the evaluation version first. The installation process was pretty straight forward and we installed and configured it in 2 hours on one of our servers in the USA. We were astonished to see the amount of features this product has to offer: SSL encryption of the data transfers, security rights on user, group and repository level, email communication etc. etc. We still did not discover everything it has to offer.

We came across 2 minor issues and send an email to the Dynamsoft support team and we were really surprised to see how quick this team responded to our issues. At the same time we imported the current VSS databases we had and mapped the users to new accounts, this import process was going smooth without any problems, I was astonished.

User Feedback

This is an enormous improvement in our productivity and takes away the frustration users had while working with VSS, they want to program and nothing more. More users in our organization tested it and were all unanimous in their feedback and replied: "Pls purchase this product as quickly as possible"and so we did.

During this pilot project we were receiving emails from the Dynamsoft Marketing team asking whether we liked the product and if they could do something for us in case of any issues. This was very positive to see - these folks really knew how important customers are for their business.

GoLive

We listened to our users and purchased the licenses and instead of reinstalling the program again, we only had to load a new serial number and reimported the VSS databases again to make a fresh start. We were able to do all of this in 1 hour, so again no downtime. Users could continue with their work, are using a great new product and, even more important, they are happy again and therefore being more productive than ever.

Conclusion

So the bottom line is this : If you are experiencing the same issues as we did with VSS, using it locally or even over the WAN like we did, with users located worldwide, then SourceAnywhere Standalone is the best product that is out there to do what it should do : Source Code Management without hassles, without complexity and without expensive user training. And to be honest, that is what a manager needs for this team, a good product that can be installed easily, with a good pricing model and a stable SQL based backend database, no user training required when using VSS before and great support. Because users not checking in data due to performance issues and optionally losing data caused by a workstation/hard drive crash is more expensive to an organization !!

Therefore we can recommend your organization to look at the Dynamsoft products, please check their site at www.dynamsoft.com and start with the evaluation version like we did and discover yourself it really rocks.

Martin de Bruin
IT – Manager Global Engineering Systems
ASCO Numatics