OpenMake Software: A Continuous Build and Delivery Specialist

“You cannot improve one thing by 1000% but you can improve 1000 little things by 1%.” – Jan Carlzon

The world is now witnessing the coming of age of the software economy. Companies have learned to stay on top by creating better software at a rapid pace. Unlike the past, Developers now have strong buying power, gaining budget dollars to acquire tools that allow them to do more in shorter sprints, moving away from slow monolithic software lifecycles to fast, agile practices.

OpenMake Software is well positioned in this new market by offering solutions that address both developer productivity and life cycle management for automating software builds and software deployments. The company offers these solutions at an ‘easy entry’ price, including a free download to small teams, allowing companies to reduce the financial risk of entering this corporate process change. It caters to the independent, tactical needs of the development teams while supporting the strategic architectural planning requirements of operations. OpenMake’s solutions allow Development and Operations to collaborate early in the lifecycle, reducing errors that can substantially slow down the process of releasing software to production.

In order to stay competitive, the company keeps a finger on the heartbeat of the latest technology. It strives to deliver new solutions supporting the ‘new’ datacenter requirements such as Containers (like Docker), Clouds and virtual environments. As a self-funded organization, it continuously balances time to market with delivering what is critical to its customers.

OpenMake Software was founded in 1995 by Steve Taylor and Tracy Ragan. It has over 500 customers worldwide and is the largest provider of build (compile/link) automation available on the Market.

Service Offerings
The company offers solutions in application build automation and application release automation (ARA).

Release Engineer is a strategic software delivery tool serving the independent DevOps needs of a project team and the architectural planning requirements of operations. Using ‘next generation’ agentless deployment technology, it deploys to multi-platform servers, clouds, or containers. It simplifies component packaging, database updates, jumping versions, calendaring and offloads your overworked CI process, all within a highly reusable model driven framework.

OpenMake Meister is the only build automation solution available on the market that supports a model driven framework for managing the compile and link process. Meister advances DevOps by providing a framework from which both developers and operation teams can communicate, manage, tweak and understand how software is compiled, linked and archived. It accelerates builds, relieves congestion and gathers critical dependency information that is used to package binaries for deployment success. OpenMake Meister can improve the functionality of any Continuous Build process such as Jenkins by offloading overworked CI workflows. Meister includes Server Pooling for distributing CI workloads and supports over 10,000 builds per day on a single Meister Engine. It accelerates full builds by over 50% and supports accurate incremental builds needed by agile practices.

Clientage
OpenMake Software ‘cuts teeth’ in the financial and retail sectors. USAA, Discover Card, Harland-Clarke, BNSF, American Family Insurance, the Government of China, the Government of Canada, and NASA are all customers of OpenMake Software.

Client Testimonial
“UCLA’s challenge was to standardize how builds and releases were processed, regardless of the development language used. OpenMake Meister provided this across the enterprise.”
– University of Southern California

Geographies
OpenMake services North America, Latin America, EMEA and Asia. In 2016, the company is planning to venture in to Africa by working with some South African banks. The headquarters is located in Chicago, IL and the EMEA customers are serviced out of Leeds, United Kingdom.

Focus Areas
DevOps and Continuous Delivery is the current focus area of the company. In its next release, scheduled for early 2016, OpenMake will be heavily focused on supporting Containers and integrating with external datacenter tools such as Ansible. Building out its ecosystem around datacenter solutions will improve the coordination of software releases with the infrastructure layer.

Knowing the Key Executives
Stephen J. King, President and CEO
Stephen brings vision and leadership to the OpenMake Software team. Prior to joining Catalyst, he was CEO of Marqui, a software- as-a-service provider of web 2.0 marketing solutions. Prior to Marqui, he was Executive Vice President and General Manager at Merant PLC, a $130M global enterprise software provider. Prior to joining Merant in 2002, Stephen led Terayon Communications Systems’ cable solutions group, growing the business by more than 20 percent per quarter to $280 million in revenue. Prior to that, he served as the chief operating officer at digital video start-up Imedia Corporation, and as a Regional Manager for the Middle East and Africa for Tektronix.

Steve Taylor, CTO and Co-Founder
Steve is an expert in software build management spanning multiple languages and platforms. He is the architect of OpenMake Meister, the first commercially available build management solution. With more than 20 years of experience in application development, he has the answers for solving the most difficult of build and release issues. Prior to founding OpenMake Software in 1995, Steve served as a Technical Consultant assisting companies with defining a solid build and release process. He received his Bachelors of Science Degree in Computer Science/Mathematics from the University of Illinois-CU.

Tracy Ragan, COO and Co-Founder
Tracy has had extensive experience in the development and implementation of DevOps for large organizations. She began her consulting career in 1989 on Wall Street specializing in build, testing and release management for the distributed platform. Her knowledge and experience contributed to the creation of OpenMake Meister, the first commercial Build Automation solution. She served on the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors as an Add-in Provider Representative for 5 years. Tracy holds a BS Degree in Business Administration, Computer Technology from California State University, Pomona.

“We deliver a highly reusable and integrated build, release and deploy DevOps tool chain that serves both the tactical needs of a project team and the strategic planning needs of operations.”