Application Development | Feature

Electric Cloud Offers Free Trial License

Through Sept. 30, nonprofit educational institutions can receive a free six-month license for Electric Cloud’s ElectricCommander Workgroup Edition, a cloud solution that automates certain tasks to help developers and IT personnel speed up the creation of homegrown applications, like custom-built online learning or enrollment programs.

• By Stephen Noonoo
• 09/06/11

Through Sept. 30, nonprofit educational institutions can receive a free six-month license for Electric Cloud’s ElectricCommander Workgroup Edition, a cloud solution that automates certain tasks to help developers and IT personnel speed up the creation of homegrown applications, like custom-built online learning or enrollment programs.

The workgroup edition employs nearly all of the same features as the company’s enterprise product, but is designed specifically for smaller organizations, such as schools or districts, with fewer application developers.

ElectricCommander works by automating repetitive tasks that occur in the application development process, such as building, testing, packaging, and deployment. It also frees developers from maintaining homegrown, script-based systems, or adjusting their processes to fit open-source tools.

According to Kalyan Ramanathan, the company’s vice president of marketing, the service is especially useful as more and more organizations adopt agile development methodologies, which can shorten the development process through the use of multiple prototypes throughout the build cycle for the purpose of obtaining useful, implementable feedback.

"For non-profit organizations, every penny counts, and we want to give development teams at colleges, universities, and other non-profit educational institutions access to the same time- and money-saving automation that enterprises enjoy with ElectricCommander," said company CEO Mike Maciag. "The automation and management provided by ElectricCommander mean faster, more efficient development for schools and universities, whether they’re using physical, virtual, or cloud resources, or any combination of the three."

The workgroup edition can support up to 10 users and five resources, which refer to the physical or virtual machines used to develop or test applications. Users can also upgrade to the company’s enterprise edition, which supports an unlimited number of users and resources and helps improve system performance for teams in multiple locations.

"What our solution does is automate the software development process--this compile-build-test-deploy process--but equally important, it leverages the cloud infrastructure to run these various processes," Ramanathan said.

Non-profit educational institutions that wish to take advantage of this offer can e-mail [email protected] and mention “back to school.”