InformationWeek

December 8, 1997

CenterLine Retools For Total Quality Management

Comeback bolstered by new management team, new product

By Alan Radding

revived CenterLine Software Inc. hopes to avoid the mistakes that tripped it up in the past as it attempts to pioneer a software development tool for ap- plication life-cycle management. CenterLine, once highly regarded for its sophisticated C and C++ compilers and other tools for the Unix development market, nose-dived when large Unix systems vendors moved into its market. With a new management team and a new product, Acqua v.2, the company is climbing back.

Few companies survive to learn from their mistakes. "We flew too close to the Sun," quips Steve Kaufer, CenterLine's founder and VP of engineering, referring to Sun Microsystems. Sun recognized that compilers were key to boosting the performance of its systems. "Sun wanted to make its machines fast, so they put more engineers to work on compilers than we had in our entire company," Kaufer explains.

CenterLine should have seen the blow coming when Sun started aggressively selling its own programming environment, putting intense pressure on customers to climb onto the Sun bandwagon. "We didn't correctly judge the effort and leverage that Sun would apply," says Kaufer. "If we had, we would have moved faster."

CenterLine was slow to recognize and react to the changes in the market, and began a seemingly irreversible slide. Like many software vendors, CenterLine had seen an opportunity early on and exploited it successfully-until a big player muscled in, quickly taking over the entire market.

Takeover-Proof
From that point on, CenterLine didn't have a future in the Unix C/C++ tools market. But, unlike many companies in similar circumstances, the Cambridge, Mass., company didn't disappear.

Instead, CenterLine is trying to re-establish itself in a new niche, one that isn't as susceptible to takeover by industry giants. The so-called application delivery management market addresses developers' need to centrally organize, track, and report on diverse quality efforts at each stage of the application development and delivery life cycle. This includes everything from testing and configuration management to defect management. CenterLine recently released its first automated test tool, Acqua v.2 (formerly QC/ Advantage).

"They are targeting a real problem-the fractured application life cycle," says Melina Ballou, a senior analyst in Waltham, Mass., for the Meta Group. Currently, software-quality information is stored in the different tools used at each stage of the application development process-testing, configuration-management, and problem-reporting tools.

That hinders the ability of managers to get a comprehensive view of the state of the application from a quality standpoint. There's been an inability to collect this data and report across the entire life cycle.

CenterLine is the first to stake out this niche. "There really has been no support f or managing the whole process," says Dan Kara, VP of advanced technology at the Sentry Group, a technology consulting firm in Westboro, Mass. The key to CenterLine's approach is its integration of information from the different tools. Rather than expect individual vendors to build the interfaces, CenterLine is building the native interfaces necessary to bring all the information together in its central repository.

Multiple Platforms
Some customers see this as a godsend. "We needed a tool to manage test scripts, and we wanted one tool that we could use across many platforms," explains Michael Conley, a senior system consultant at Pershing, a Florham Park, N.J., division of financial-services firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc. Pershing already had a test script-management tool, but it was focused on the mainframe.

With Acqua, Pershing's quality-assurance team can centrally organize all test scripts along with other code-quality measurements. The tests are available for reuse, and projec t managers can access information collected by other tools to evaluate progress and determine how best to proceed.

Similarly, Auspex Systems Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif., maker of high-end Unix servers, stumbled upon Acqua in its search for a test-management tool. "Before Acqua, we had tests scattered in many different places," says Frank Lemmon, Auspex's lead engineer for product-assurance tools. Auspex now puts every test in Acqua's centralized repository. "When we want a test, we know where to find it."

Despite the positive initial reception, CenterLine has a tough job ahead. By moving from low-level compilers to high-level quality-management tools, CenterLine must address a different set of customers-not programmers, but business managers who need to know if a build is on schedule. "This requires a different approach to sales and marketing," concedes Kaufer.

To deliver that different approach, CenterLine cleaned house, bringing in a new management team led by president Marco Emrich, and marketi ng VP Alyssa Dver, both of whom worked previously at Digital Equipment.

Under Emrich, the company went through a top-to-bottom reorganization. Emrich changed the way CenterLine builds products, restructured the sales force, and launched a new product strategy. "The company had a good reputation for technology, but its business and marketing leadership was clearly lacking," recalls Emrich.

CenterLine had to re-establish relationships with its customers. "We had lost touch with our customers who thought our products were either mature or dead," says Emrich. CenterLine wasn't perceived as a strategic vendor.

Emrich is committed to restarting revenue growth. The first phase in his rehabilitation plan began in late September with the introduction of Acqua v.2. The next phase of the product strategy-version 3.0-is set to hit the market early in 1998. It will deliver more of the analysis, design, and modeling capabilities needed for application delivery. High on Emrich's to-do list is integrating Cente rLine's remaining programming tools into its application delivery framework for use with Acqua.

While the new management team radiates enthusiasm and optimism, CenterLine's new customers are more cautious. "We were concerned about their ups and downs," says Pershing's Conley.

As reassurance, CenterLine agreed to place its Acqua source code in escrow, just in case. However, even Conley admits that the concerns might be overblown: "With a tool like this, there isn't a big risk," he says. At worst, the company would be stuck with a repository for which it would have to integrate new tools on its own, which wouldn't be an impossible task.

Outstanding Issue
The bigger question is whether CenterLine can stave off competition. Most of its competitors at this point have solutions that are more limited in their platform coverage or scope, notes Conley. Testing-tool vendors typically offer some kind of test-management capability, but their solutions work only with their own tools, says Judith H urwitz, president of the Hurwitz Group, a software consulting firm in Framingham, Mass., and an InformationWeek columnist.

Kaufer isn't concerned with small point product vendors. CenterLine's vendor agnosticism enables users to mix and match a variety of point tools under Acqua. But burned once by Sun, he has thought carefully about the mistakes the company made and concludes that this situation is different. "This is much more broad-based than what we did in the past," he says. "It will be much harder for one big company to work across different platforms and products. We don't have a big legacy customer base to serve."

CenterLine's biggest challenge may be convincing a sufficiently large market that it needs the company's vision of application life-cycle management in the first place.

"There is definitely a problem to be solved, and CenterLine has put together a reasonable approach," says Hurwitz. "But I'm not sure it is a high priority with many users yet."

Emrich is convinced that CenterL ine's timing is right. "Two years ago, we couldn't do it. The urgency was not there. But today there is urgency," he says. The Internet and the Web are driving that feeling, forcing companies into shorter and shorter development cycles and dramatically increasing the consequences of poor software quality.

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