Increasing productivity with data synchronization

PHOENIX TECHNOLOGIES

CHALLENGE

The work done by Phoenix Technologies’ 250 developers in Asia was dependent on access to the latest changes from developers based in North America. This often involved regular checkouts exceeding 1GB from their US Subversion server. Because of time zone differences, network outages often meant that developers in Asia would lose up to a whole day if their work depended on the latest source code changes from the US. Deadlines were missed and new product launches were delayed.

If Phoenix Technologies was going to be able to meet global demand for its widely used embedded software products and take advantage of the economies of scale globally distributed development can offer, they needed a reliable solution to enable them to stay competitive.

SOLUTION

Phoenix deployed SVN MultiSite at their development centers in Taipei, Taiwan, and Milpitas, California. Over 300 developers based in six different locations across East Asia and North America now have access to the latest changes from everywhere immediately and simultaneously as if they were all working together at one location. No retraining was required because SVN MultiSite is completely transparent and Subversion's behavior doesn't change. Backup and disaster recovery are automatic and the entire implementation can be monitored and administered from a single location. The downtime and performance problems Phoenix suffered in the past have been eliminated.

RESULTS

• Checkouts and commits now happen at local area network speed. Developers at every location have access to the same source code simultaneously at local area network speed
• Build cycle times have been reduced by more than 60% as continuous builds have been enabled at every location
• Productivity is up by over 30% with SVN MultiSite as previously over two hours of development time had been lost each day due to poor network performance and outages
• Phoenix's results are similar to a recent Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) Report which revealed that SVN MultiSite delivered a return on investment (ROI) of 357% with a payback period of fewer than two months. The subject of the study, Pitney Bowes, is a Fortune 500 company with annual revenues of over $5 billion that had deployed SVN MultiSite two years earlier. Forrester’s TEI methodology measures costs and cost reduction and weighs the enabling value of a technology in increasing the effectiveness of overall business processes