We're happy to announce that our CVSDude techies recently implemented the upgrade of popular integrated wiki and issue tracking tool Trac to version 0.11.4, which applies to accounts on the new FrogSAFE platform. The upgrade from 0.10.3 includes a number of enhancements and features that customers should find very useful, including:

• a configurable workflow in the ticket subsystem
• an improved user preferences subsystem, which includes the ability for any user to select their time zone and disable access keys
• improvements to wiki usability, including ability to handle conflicts in case of concurrent edits
• an improved repository browser, including in-place expansion of folders, and much more.

After a failed theft attempt at GroovyChannel's North Sydney office, GroovyChannel Inc CEO Joe Ward wanted to share a few words with CVSDude and our customers on the experience and CVSDude's role. So in his words...

The value of the CVSDude service has never been more apparent for us at GroovyChannel than now, in the wake of an apparent theft attempt of our intellectual property. I'm happy to report that the source code for our accelerated SQL database technology is secure thanks to this partnership with CVSDude.

GroovyChannel is a pioneer in multicore-optimized SQL standard database software targeting enterprise cloud computing needs, and we recently launched a $7 million capital raising round in advance of our move from Australia to the US. Our technology enables a database to run on a server in memory across multiple processor cores, enabling instantaneous data updates while still maintaining industry-standard transactional database properties. 

At the beginning of this month, thieves broke into the North Sydney office and used explosives to break open the company's safe. As CEO of Groovy Channel, I'm relieved the thieves were unable to access our valuable intellectual property - they'd targeted the safe where we kept our software prior to engaging with CVSDude. The thieves left all the other valuable equipment sitting there untouched, including a $30,000 server from Intel. There was concrete all over the floor and debris sprayed around the office.

We engaged CVSDude at an early stage in our development to host GroovyChannel's source code on high-security US-based datacenters, and to maintain the integrity of our intellectual property. This need has never been more important than at this time of fundraising and relocation to the US.

Using the unique capabilities and opportunities afforded by a cloud-based, fully managed and supported source code control solution, CVSDude facilitates secure, collaborative software development for geographically distributed teams working for many of the world's leading organizations. CVSDude's FrogSAFE technology platform allows a single administrator to configure a suite of open source version control tools and manage hundreds of developers and projects, using CVSDude's simple web portal software. The FrogSAFE platform uses the latest in secure storage technology -- all data is transferred via encrypted protocols, backed up to multiple industry-compliant datacenters every 10 minutes, and can be mirrored to customers' on-site servers daily.

"The vision for CVSDude is that as software companies trust and embrace a hosted service for source code management, project cycles will shorten and startup costs will continue to fall," says Jason Seed, CEO and Managing Director of CVSDude. "Our conversations with Mr. Ward in the immediate aftermath of the break-in and explosion at the GroovyChannel office underscored both the need and value of this enterprise-critical service."  

I echo this sentiment; we saw CVSDude as a strategic partner right from the start, but this break-in and attempted theft has more than proven the value of such a partnership. Nice work!

Read The Australian's full article about the GroovyChannel break-in.

About GroovyChannel:
Based in San Francisco, Sydney and Hyderabad, India, GroovyChannel is focused on delivering database & cloud solutions (hosted DB's) and appliances for web properties needing a fast real-time experience that scales easily, as opposed to the page-by-page download, slow and frustrating experience delivered now. The GroovyChannel database (GroovyDB) offers a standard based RDBMS solution with unparalleled scalability and GroovyChannel's revolutionary Web Push. GroovyChannel is breaking new ground in multicore-optimized SQL standard database software, able to provide the required high performance and cost effectiveness to address the demands of Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing enabling LIVE real time data access. http://www.groovychannel.com/ 

If you're a user of our new FrogSAFE V4 Platform, you may have noticed a small spinning circular AJAX symbol at the top of the GUI screen.  Little daemons at work - making the platform hum.

While most of you are probably aware of daemons (and possibly don't care much about them as long as they're not causing problems) I just thought I'd share a few words about them because they're an important part of our new platform architecture.

The core of what enables us to leverage fundamental cloud computing components - like dedicated servers, and virtual slices in various data centers - is our custom written daemons. Without going into too much detail, our lead engineers, Sarah George, Mark George and Emil Emilov, designed a range of daemons that ensure all jobs are performed, and all accounts are autoprovisioned and backed up. These daemons run on each of our hosted instances, and are constantly talking to each other and listening for jobs that they need to perform. Each daemon is aware of where it sits in the cloud of server instances, what its role in life is, and happily goes about performing its duty and reporting back home if there are issues with multiple fail safes built in. You'll see the daemons in action as that little spinning circular AJAX arrow at the top of our admin GUI. 

So whether it be to calculate your disk quota, build a fresh instance of Subversion, enable authentication over all our tools via the same username, backup your repositories to the nearest 10 minutes, etc., we have written a series of complex daemons that will talk to each other, communicating in parallel over multiple server instances to bring you a rock solid, scalable and reliable platform. 

For the past 18 months the CVSDude team has been hard at work re-engineering our technology platform. Our system design builds on our 6+ years of experience in this industry, and is vastly improved by your regular feedback and feature suggestions, since the initial release of CVSDude in late 2002. We are really excited to finally have it out the door and live, after being in closed BETA for over 6 months.

There are a whole bunch of technical achievements our guys have made - too many to list here, so I'll just touch on the coolest stuff.

CVSDude FrogSAFE (TM) platform

Our new platform has been designed to be completely scalable, with each service (application instance) now residing on a cluster of servers optimized specifically for that service. For example,  Subversion repositories now reside on servers only running Subversion. This is a major improvement over our previous design, where we managed multiple service instances on each server. The new design allows us to tune each cluster specifically for that service, and thus gain the maximum performance out of each node in the cluster. 

There has been a lot of talk lately about cloud computing and SaaS - CVSDude has been a true SaaS company, computing in the cloud since day one. We get a lot of people saying to us, "why don't you just host CVSDude in the cloud?"  As it turns out, offering Enterprise reliability and performance is far more complex than buying servers and virtualized slices from Amazon EC2, Rackspace, or Softlayer. You still need sophisticated software to connect together all these basic building blocks and turn them into something useful. This is what we have spent so much time on, and why we can leverage cloud computing building blocks and turn them into a powerful platform that's redundant, available, scalable and secure.

The same can be said for the tools we offer on our platform. Given that the majority of software tools we offer are open source, and that each of the disparate tools don't talk to each other natively, we have spent a lot of time making all these powerful tools available via our platform, removing the pain generally associated with setting up and configuring such tools, and enabling them to talk to each other seamlessly.

So with the combination of a redundant, available, scalable and secure powerful backend infrastructure built from disparate components, and a powerful suite of integrated Open Source tools running on it, we look forward to continuing to offer our customers a great solution for their software development needs, now and in the future, as we add more and more useful tools and tool integrations to our platform.

Over the coming week I'll be posting more about some of the core components that make up our platform. Stay tuned!

 Mark Bathie - Founder / CTO.

Today we're calling out to all of you in the gaming industry who are attending, or thinking of attending, the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco's Moscone Center from 23 to 27 March.  Guy Marion and Jason Seed will be attending the conference from 24 to 26 March as part of Game Connection America, and we invite anyone and everyone to come by and chat with us about CVSDude's hosted version control products and services, and how we can assist with your gaming (and other) projects. Or you can just drop in and say hello - we'll be with the Queensland/Australia contingent at Booth 167 in the South Hall (Hall A) of the center on 747 Howard Street in San Francisco.  If you're already a registered exhibitor and have something specific you'd like to discuss with us, feel free to request a meeting through your Game Connection portal. 
 
It's no secret that the GDC is an important event in the gaming calendar.  It attracts over 18,000 industry insiders and is the home of both the annual Independent Games Festival - the first and largest competition for independent games - and the Game Developers Choice Awards presented by Gamasutra.com.  The conference brings together programmers, artists, producers, game designers, audio professionals, business decision-makers and others involved in the development of interactive games gather to exchange ideas and shape the future of the industry. So what better place for us to stay up to date with the source control and project management needs of game developers? 
 
Hosting your game code with CVSDude:
In December last year, Gamasutra.com tipped outsourcing as a trend that will continue across the industry, which reflects the business world's increasing interest in the cost-benefits of outsourcing software development infrastructure needs. Whether you're an independent developer who has been outsourced for your artistic talents and require a safe place to host your code, or a production company wanting to outsource your development team's version control, CVSDude's range of subversion hosting plans will give you the security and backup reliability you need to protect your valuable data. 
 
CVSDude already provides hosted source control, bug tracking and project management tools to gaming clients such as Perpetual FX Creative (the brains behind the new Galactic Bowling game), Solstar Games (the company responsible for the Realm Crafter products) and Razer Zone (world leaders in the development of quality precision gaming peripherals). 
 
If you want to know more about how CVSDude can assist you, have a look at our features and explore our website, or have our sales team contact you.
 
Happy gaming, and we look forward to meeting some of you at the GDC.

Today we launched our FrogSAFE V4 Platform, or "V4" as you may have heard it referred to in recent months. Starting today, visitors and new customers will sign up directly to the CVSDude V4 Platform.

"SAFE" stands for Secure Application Fusion Engine, which describes our core competency- delivering multiple version control and issue tracking tools through a single, unified interface. The design process, development and testing, and release of our new Platform has required tremendous effort- and will continue as we iterate over the coming months.

System highlights include:

• Complete system and user interface redesign
  
• Clean, fast UI (AJAX) that supports per-project SVN, Trac, Bugzilla and DAV repository configurations
• Activity Feeds & user profiling
• Upcoming API release
• Greatly improved system speed and reliability, due to improved server management software layers. Our cluster-based infrastructure is optimized for each hosted application.
  
• Built-in integration with Trac, Basecamp, Lighthouse, and FogBugz (via SVN commit hooks)
• Our "10/100" Backup and Recovery System, which includes 10-minute backups of most recent changes, daily downloadable backups (configurable  through your account), and daily restore snapshots for past 100 days
• Rationalization of our hosting products into three Product Editions, oriented towards small developer groups, mid-size collaborative teams, and Enterprises
• A new subscription payment system, that allows you to manage your own subscriptions from within CVSDude, and pay by VISA/AMEX/Mastercard. Incidentally, our online payment system is delivered by Zuora- a customer of ours and a PCI-Compliant market leader.

To raise awareness about of the benefits of Subversion hosting and SaaS, we have revamped CVSDude.com to include over 70 pages of technical, security and product documentation, screenshots, cost savings, Code of Conduct, and more. We are also launching help.cvsdude.com, a wiki-based support system that offers user guides, tutorials, and technical support contacts. This is just the start - CVSDude is far behind on whitepapers and open source project support. 

Finally, CVSDude is proud to announce our new Green Offset Program. We have put funding and strategies in place to preserve large tracts of rainforest in the Solomon Islands (working with former academic colleagues at the University of Queensland, Australia). By supporting community-run rainforest preserves that are preventing  commercial logging activities, this project conserves  endagered biodiversity while completely offseting our company's carbon footprint. UQ researchers estimate that CVSDude is ensuring "burial" (sequestration) of 450 tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2009, vs. company hosting and activities that total at most 150 tonnes. So rest assured that you are "doing your part" with Carbon-Neutral infrastructure, and if you feel so inclined, we invite you to donate to the program during signup or through your Billing settings.

Finally, some important issues about how migrating to the CVSDude V4 Platform affects you:

• Our V4 Platform has been in Beta since July 2008, and is already serving 120 accounts and 2000+ live users. The migration process has minimal customer impact
• Existing customers will be contacted by email in the coming weeks, and for planning purposes will be asked to schedule a preferred two hour migration window 
  
• Migrations are typically completed in a matter of minutes.

Enjoy - and please send through your thoughts by posting...

Greetings from Palo Alto, California! Some of you may have read in recent news - such as Techcrunch, SD Times and Intranet Journal - that CVSDude has made the strategic decision to move our corporate headquarters to the heart of Silicon Valley (local customers, feel free to drop by).  It's true.

It's all part of a new chapter in the CVSDude story, and one we anticipate will be welcomed by the two thirds of our subversion hosting customers who are US-based. Our US-based executives and teams will be focused on technical support, business development and marketing,  kicking off with the release of our new website and V4 Platform shortly (see below). 

Our core R&D team will remain in Australia (HQ on the Gold Coast, with satellites in Brisbane and Melbourne), with tangential developers in India and Eastern Europe. With developers now spanning broad swaths of the planet, we will be able to expand tech support services to the Pacific and European time zones.

In a few weeks we'll be releasing our new website and rebuilt software/hardware Platform, which will eventually replace our existing systems-- watch this space for our full upcoming review. The platform features distributed, multi-redundant server architecture, a clean new AJAX-based UI, resulting in increased stability and much faster load times. This platform has been beta tested by over 2,000 users over the past year, and has been receiving rave reviews. 

We're aware that outages or network slowdowns may have affected some users over the past year. This is largely attributable to both the technical and human demands that come with a rapid increase in usership. We apologize if you've been affected by any outages, and thank you for your patience. Our new Platform has been carefully designed to address these scaling issues, as have our business expansion plans. We're confident that our customers will enjoy the benefits!

We are also excited to announce that CVSDude is taking over SharpForge.com and Projxpert.com (two SVN hosting competitors), who approached us in January of this year. As of March, the CVSDude group of companies will be looking after clients and users of these sites.  

Finally, despite the worldwide recession, we had our best revenue month ever last month (January). We see this a testament to the strength of the SaaS business model, which minimizes your upfront costs.  So it seems an opportune time to say thank you to you, our friends and customers, for your support and commitment to cloud-based technology.

Last night I was invited by Zuora.com, the leader in online subscription billing for SaaS companies, to present at their Z-Commerce Platform product release gig. Speaking to over 100 analysts, prospective and current Zuora clients in San Mateo CA, I described our experience of incorporating their new API-driven SaaS billing system to replace our PayPal system (watch this space- we are releasing soon).

As part of the introduction, Zuora's CEO Tien Tzuo described their use of CVSDude to support their globally distributed development teams. Tien made several points that ring true with us as a company and I think many of our clients:

 1. No Servers. Zuora owns no servers- it is a 100% cloud (SaaS) company. They use Salesforce for CRM, Google Apps for email/docs, and CVSDude for their hosted Subversion source control and issue tracking needs. This approach has dramatically reduced Zuora's startup costs and allows them to redistribute headcount to core tasks, such as product delivery and customer service. 

 2. Why buy the cow when you only need the milk? If it's milk you're looking for, then steer clear of owning the cow. Cows need a farm to live on, food to eat, a farmer to milk it, a vet to treat it...sound familiar?

Similarly, new SaaS companies often look at building their own subscription billing system (we almost did), or configuring and maintaining their own source control servers and applications. It is never just the upfront and obvious costs that need to be considered.

A smart software company aims to sell its developers time thousands of times over. So by ensuring that our developers are focused on developing the new CVSDude Platform (get ready!), we are multiplying their value and creating profit.

• $10k of developer time spent on internal projects and server maintenance = $10k cost
• $10k of developer time spent on building sellable products & apps = $XXX,XXX of PROFIT
  

We have a great synergy with Zuora. We are one anothers' clients, we run our businesses in a similar manner, and we focus on improving on our core strengths while outsourcing the rest to others. If you are developing SaaS products or solutions and now need to monetize, then I recommend you check out Zuora (note: an appreciative, not affiliate, link).

Most technology companies spend vast amounts of time maintaining their software development infrastructure-- time better spent building products. Subversion Hosting and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers allow clients to outsource non-core tasks to experts, who promise time and cost savings. While good in theory, how do you know that adopting a SaaS solution really will deliver?

Jason Rothbart of ReadWriteWeb recently wrote that installing and maintaining a site license of Sharepoint for a 100 person company would take four and a half years before becoming cheaper than an equivalent SaaS solution, by which time the licensed software would be obsolete.

We investigated how 241 technology companies  (now SaaS customers) previously maintained open source version control and issue tracking tools in-house. Amazingly, the average surveyed technology company spent 3,000 hours or $160,000 in direct costs on Software Change Management (SCM) each year. Enterprises easily spend five or ten times that.

In contrast, SaaS solutions are specialized and feature-rich, are regularly backed up, sell for less than $1,000 per year, and allow customers to focus on more valuable activities. 

The Cost of "Doing It Yourself"

To calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) of maintaining in-house software change management (SCM) systems, in 2008 CVSDude sent survey invitations to over 10,000 people. We received 241 completed responses, mostly from CEOs, CTOs or lead developers in small to medium sized technology businesses, and in Enterprises.

Two thirds of surveyed organizations said that they consider source control and issue management a mission-critical activity. Activities ranged from installing, upgrading, and supporting version control and issue tracking software, maintaining hardware and performing regular backups. Costs were categorized as:

Hardware. The 241 respondents spent an average of $3,500 per year (and up to $12,000) on hardware purchases or rental related to source control. A minority of customers piggybacked their version control repositories and bug tracking software onto multi-instance servers housing email, webservers, customer databases & project management tools.

Software Implementation. While the open source applications hosted by CVSDude are free to download, their implementation is costly. Respondents spent on aveage 116 hours each month deploying SCM software, including:

• 69 hours per month installing and patching SCM applications
  
• 47 hours bug-fixing and troubleshooting SCM applications

Ongoing Maintenance & Support. Respondents spent on average 87 hours each month on in-house technical support, including installing plugins, configuring user permissions, or upgrading software. These activities were described as "not productive" or even "detrimental" for developers trying to focus on core product development.

Data Backup and Recovery. Performing regular, offsite backups of critical source code is essential. Not surprisingly, the average respondent took 45 hours each month backing up and recovering project data. Yet even the most disciplined admin can let backups slip through the cracks during busy times, not because they don't value their own code, but because taking off-site redundant backups is a laborious and detail-oriented task.

Before outsourcing to CVSDude, respondents used to spend some 3,000 hours per year (250 hours per month) maintaining in-house source control and issue tracking systems. This usually involves a system administrator earning conservatively $90,000 per year ($52.17 per hour with overheads), costing $155,460 each year in labor time. With hardware costs, this adds up to $160,000 per year.

SaaS Economies of Scale

In comparison, by outsourcing to CVSDude, customers identified the following key value drivers:

• More than 90% total cost savings, with low upfront costs due to monthly subscription or discounted annual payments
• Initial implementation costs are virtually nil - setting up a new account required simple configuration of projects and user access through web-based software and uploading existing project data to the CVSDude system.
• Secure multi-site access and an easy way to share and collaborate on projects with clients and teammates outside of the corporate firewall
• Fully-maintained, always upgraded software: CVSDude administrators carefully bug-check new software releases for potential incompatibilities before upgrading the software
• Improved redundancy & security: All CVSDude projects are backed up every 10-minutes to multiple datacenters, ensuring that customer data is always secure and recoverable

What's the Catch?

Security. The main concern of all prospective SaaS customers is for the security of their data. For this reason, CVSDude employs redundant drives, servers and datacenters - all monitored by full-time dedicated staff and delivered to thousands of leading organizations, 24x7. Customers can opt to mirror project histories to on-premise servers. Interestingly, the #1 reason why our customers adopted CVSDude was for "risk-management & data security" (21% of responders).

Control. By outsourcing to a third-party provider, you give up certain controls such as root-level access, the ability to reconfigure or move projects around at will or install your own plugins. Fortunately, by serving thousands of customer requests over time, CVSDude has deeply modified and integrated our products and redesigned our interface so that we can accommodate 95% of customer needs.

Integration. As customers expand and utilize a range of in-house and hosted tools, it becomes more important to integrate them via a single service. While CVSDude already allows you to integrate your Subversion commits with Trac or FogBugz tickets, 2009 will bring exciting new developments in this area.

Have you run the numbers yourself? Let us know what you found!

Hi - my name is Jason Seed, and it is my honor and privilege to bring you CVSDude's first official blog posting as the newly-appointed CEO. As a new member of the team, I am also fortunate (and proud) to share the core principles of the company and its founding members.

History

CVSDude, the leading Subversion Hosting provider, was born of an innovative idea that was ahead of its time. Mark Bathie, the company founder, had experienced the difficulties of installing and supporting open source version control applications firsthand. He decided there was a business to be created in hosting source control and bug tracking for technology companies - and he was right. This was back in 2002, when the application service provider (ASP) model was on the wane and Software as a Service (Saas) in the business arena had yet to gain early acceptance. Mark had a core belief that software companies would come to trust and embrace his hosted service for their source code management, given the huge time and cost savings it delivered. This was a belief that flew in the face of accepted wisdom in the early 2000s.

Early Days

Mark's vision was soon proved correct, as over 150 users signed up for the service within 90 days of its low-key launch. The service grew quickly by word of mouth, blog postings, and industry reviews. Mark soon found that he required business assistance, and joined Australia's 2007 Technology Incubator of the Year, to help him realize the next stage of CVSDude's evolution.

At about that time, Mark approached his long-time friend, Guy Marion, who had just completed his Ph.D., had witnessed CVSDude grow, and had roots in Silicon Valley. Guy joined in 2006 in charge of business development and marketing. His charter included a website overhaul and implementing strategies to better serve increasingly savvy customers seeking web based project management tools.

It was through the iLab mentoring process that Mark, Guy & I first met. I was asked to present to the iLab companies about my experiences as a CEO and we developed an instant rapport.

New CEO

I soon joined the CVSDude mentoring panel and in that position strongly suggested that it was time for the company to start its next growth cycle. Having given feedback on the new business plan, the Board soon asked if I would take the position as CEO and direct the company through this critical stage in the company's momentum. My background as a technology executive and then successfully leading (as CEO) another Australian software company through its 5 year growth plan made me a good choice for CVSDude. My international business background includes acquiring companies and opening offices in multiple countries, moving my family to Los Angeles, and serving on numerous government & company Boards.

Next Stage

Since joining CVSDude officially, my time has been focused on refining our business plan and product strategy as well as securing investment from strategic Angels (a process that continues). I am pleased to say that we have been successful in our initial rounds and are now executing on our plans.

Without letting too much out of the bag, we have exciting plans for 2009, including a rebuilt high performance Subversion hosting platform and many new features. It is an exciting time at CVSDude and we hope to share our enthusiasm with you through the new products we are unveiling next year!

Your Feedback 

Rest assured that our focus remains unabashedly on our core competency: providing the most robust hosted source control and issue tracking system, for a low upfront price.

The CVSDude team looks forward to a continued dialogue with you through this blog- thanks again for your continued support and we look forward to your feedback.