The Changing CI Market

Andrew Binstock's latest column at SD Times examines the changing CI market. While Andrew makes some guesses as to how the market will shake out, I would rather focus on his views that the market has two major market segments - Enterprise Continuous Integration and work-group CI. This division is really key to understanding the current market.

Enterprise Continuous Integration

What I think Andrew leaves out in his analysis is that Enterprise Continuous Integration has a different core audience than work-group CI. Enterprise CI is less about the developer and more about the release engineer. While rapid CI feedback to the development team remains important, Enterprise CI seeks to integrate development with testing and operations. As ECI expands its concerns beyond development, features like security and traceability play a bigger role.

AnthillPro is one of three tools Andrew highlights as participating in the Enterprise CI space. While we compete against additional solutions from time to time, Andrew has pretty much highlighted the big players. Enterprise CI differs from work-group CI in two key ways. The first is the audience difference discussed above. The second is difference is scale. Enterprise CI is happy to move beyond a single team or department and caters to much larger organizations. While some small teams use AnthillPro independently, many of our customers have hundreds or thousands of engineers on a single AnthillPro instance.

Work-group CI

The work-group tier of CI is probably the most widely accepted area right now. At Urbancode, we know this space well. Since 2001 our old open source solution provided a work-group level solution and from 2002 to 2006 we had a commercial offering in this space. Today, open-source tools like CruiseControl, and Hudson make up much of this space but commercial tools like Bamboo, TeamCity, DrumBeat and many, many others add their own special features. An installation of a work-group class continuous integration server generally serves a development team or department. The main focus of these tools is providing rapid feedback to the developers about the state of the build. A secondary focus is on performing some build management and archiving the build.

Note: for a detailed breakdown on CI vs Build Management see our white-paper.
Despite my nitpicks, I think Andrew has hit the nail on the head in his article and recommend it.

Update: We've added a page on our main website discussion how AnthillPro differs from workgroup level CI tools.