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News Catalyst Systems readies to demystify the ‘black art' of software build and release management proce
News Catalyst Systems readies to demystify the ‘black art' of software build and release management proce
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 Catalyst Systems Corporation, a long time player and pioneer of the
Build and Release Management industry with their product Openmake,
recently announced that Stephen J. King has been appointed as the new
CEO of the company. The company expects that Mr. King will not only
further position Catalyst as a leader in the software build and release
management space but also take it to a new level beyond its traditional
technology focus and establish Catalyst with a more global presence.
Today I spoke with Mr. King and Tracy Ragan, founder and COO of
Catalyst Systems, about this announcement during a podcast interview.
Catalyst Systems Corporation, a long time player and pioneer of the Build and Release Management industry with their product Openmake, recently announced that Stephen J. King has been appointed as the new CEO of the company. The company expects that Mr. King will not only further position Catalyst as a leader in the software build and release management space but also take it to a new level beyond its traditional technology focus and establish Catalyst with a more global presence. Today I spoke with Mr. King and Tracy Ragan, founder and COO of Catalyst Systems, about this announcement during a podcast interview.According to Tracy Ragan, Founder and COO of Catalyst, “Stephen’s experience, determination and market-shaping leadership will help us ensure we continue to deliver the products, partnerships and knowledge necessary to support the development community in negotiating the complexity of the global software development environment.” Although King faces some challenges in his new role, his previous experiences, most recently as CEO of the startup Marqui and at Merant where he was instrumental in the company’s turnaround and subsequent sale to Serena Software, have prepared him well. The domain expertise gained at Merant in the application lifecycle management space combined with his talent for running a startup on top of his history as a software engineer suit him for the task. King views build and release management as the “last black art” of the development process, a process left unattended or considered as an afterthought in application development. King says, “My vision for Catalyst is to help customers better understand the systems and social processes that move their code from build through release management. With software complexity and regulatory pressures increasing, we plan to help our customers demystify this part of the application lifecycle management.” Build and release management has tended to fall within two different market segments and has not traditionally been viewed as a distinct discipline of its own. In application lifecycle management, build and release are seen as integral steps in the configuration and delivery process and tightly controlled by the configuration management team. In the IDE and developer tool space, build is strongly held to be the domain of the developer and executed as routine step in the coding and testing process. Two primary challenges exist to be overcome by any player in this space. The first is to definitively identify the role of build management. The second is to elevate the level of importance of build and release beyond that of a “black art” to one of mission-critical. Each of the tool vendors in the build and release management space tend to address these challenges in a slightly different way, but they have all begun to sing the same chant drawing more and more attention from potential buyers. Other dominant commercial players in the build and release segment in addition to Catalyst are, Electric Cloud, IBM Rational Build Forge, Anthill Pro from Urbancode, Parabuild from Viewtier, Perfectbuild from Codefast and Final Builder. There are also several open source solutions available including; Ant, Maven, Cruise Control, and Luntbuild. With so much activity in the build and release management space Stephen King and Catalyst won’t have to go it alone, and 2007 may be the year for build and release. Openmake is Registered trademark of Catalyst Systems Corporation. Other product names referenced in this story are trademarks of their respective companies.
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