News

Metallect reduces the dangers of dev changes

• By Jason Turcotte
• June 28, 2006

It’s after 5 p.m. and Joe developer, working for a multibillion dollar retailer, has been slapped with another eleventh hour change request. And while coding requests for new promotions, pay methods and merchandise continue to pour in and pile up, Joe won’t be burning the midnight oil.

The retailer is just one of more than a dozen clients for whom Metallect helps ease the all-consuming task of development. Earlier this month the Plano, Texas-based company announced an upgrade to its Eclipse plug-in, which integrates access to its primary product, IQ Server. And the company is two weeks away from releasing a new version of its IQ Server, a maintenance solution that modernizes apps and identifies vulnerabilities. Metallect reps say their objective is not to change how developers do their job but to enhance it.

“All of these applications are getting so complex today…” says Guy Hoffman, CEO of Metallect. “So you have to find a way to embrace that complexity.”

Metallect provides technology that addresses some of the limitations of app dev tools, through automated source code scanning and by addressing the interdependencies between apps. Now, Hoffman says, developers who have located an app’s vulnerability can detect other risky scenarios within interdependent apps throughout the enterprise.

“Things that took hours now, literally, take minutes and things that took days now take hours,” Hoffman said. “The end result of all of this is a dramatic decrease in the IT budget, freeing up that budget for new projects.”

According to Forrester Research, large orgs spend more than 75 percent of their IT budgets on app maintenance including bug fixes, modifications, upgrades and new feature requests. In many cases, companies implement hundreds of apps and databases to run their businesses and decades of fixes, changes and integration have led to a complex highway of highly-interdependent code that developers do not always understand.

Hoffman says the release of an upgraded IQ Server brings expanded simplicity to developers. The software will make operations as non-invasive as possible. Features will include an expanded number of source repositories, a higher level of automation for rediscovery and fully automated workflows. The Metallect product promises to reduce costs, limit risk and free time for other IT endeavors.

Metallect clients run the gamut from those in the financial sector, business services, information services, to the travel industry and, now, retailers. But clients seem to have a common thread─their apps are customized, heterogeneous and are either customer-facing or revenue-generating. The apps exist as the livelihood of the clients’ biz and deal little with the back-end process.

Hoffman says, since 2002, the Metallect solution has enabled developers to match biz services; accelerate the dev cycle, modernize apps, minimize risk, adopt SOA initiatives, understand coding dependencies, and ultimately steer developers from asking: “What the blankety blank am I dealing with?”