Ecora is a world-renowned supplier of Total Configuration Management solutions, covering the fields of recovery, auditing and reporting, change monitoring, patch management, and security. The company develops, sells and supports a number of multifunctional software suites targeted at corporate customers with extensive, distributed and heterogeneous networks in need of centralized automated management.
The company currently has over 3,000 customers worldwide (in over 45 countries), including AmGen, CareGroup, Exelon, Fleet Securities, IBM, UPMC Health System, McKesson, Merrill Lynch, OfficeMax, Raytheon, RBC Centura Banks, Sempra, Snap-on, Sprint, Temple University Hospital, UPS, and various state and federal government agencies and departments.
Ecora’s flagship applications Patch Manager is intended to ease the work of system administrators entrusted with installing patches and updates to operating systems and software products on networked PCs, especially in distributed and / or heterogeneous networks spanning large numbers of computers. Patch Manager performs scanning of systems (MS Windows and Solaris-based), comparing the versions of installed OSes and applications to the current ones listed in its database and checking for the installation of security and other patches for OSes and applications. The information is stored in the Patch Manager Database and presented to the administrator so as to facilitate installation decisions. Patches and updates that are deemed to be necessary are then installed (pushed) to target machines with a number of options (scheduled delayed installation, flexible management of installation targets, optional installation verification, etc.)
The advent of a new generation of software products, the explosive growth of IT infrastructures in both traditionally digital-minded enterprises and establishments where networked computing is a recent addition leads to similar problems in both cases. No longer can the unassisted IT staff, be it highly professional and charged with a thousand-system network or barely adequate beginners with a dozen of systems, keep every computer in their charge supplied with the latest safety patches and feature updates.
The complexity of developing and constantly updating a system able to reliably discover, patch, check and otherwise manage the systems in a network becomes overwhelming for a company maintaining a traditional in-house development style. Both need for fresh ideas and need to test every aspect call for an outsourcing approach, but outsourcing comes with its own hidden dangers. With a burning demand for features, support for new applications and architectures to be satisfied, the outsourced development team originally hired by Ecora neglected the core functionality and as a result the overall quality dropped, threatening the customers and the company reputation.
The efforts of INTESYS helped increase stability and performance, improve data presentation and introduce to Patch Manager a new feature - user extensibility (enabling addition of new, not listed in the original version software products by the user’s choice so patches and updates can be handled as described above).
Entrusting Intelsys with the development and QA of the Ecora Patch Manager product, the company achieved a significant improvement in code quality, architectural integrity and end performance. With the experience of development team and rigorous testing procedures Ecora was able to present a new version of Patch Manager, winning critical acclaim and customer recognition as one of the industry’s leading products.
