"Perforce provides us a stable and flexible SCM system that allows us to focus on developing products instead of working around deficiencies of our SCM tool."

Customer Profile

Headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, Cardinal Health, Inc. (NYSE: CAH) is an $81 billion global company serving the health-care industry with a broad portfolio of products and services. Ranked number 19 on the Fortune 500 list, Cardinal Health employs more than 55,000 people on 6 continents.

Two divisions of Cardinal Health, Pyxis Products and Alaris Products, use Perforce as their Software Configuration Management (SCM) tool. Alaris provides a new level of safety and efficiency to the entire IV medication process, while Pyxis Products offers automation products that improve patient safety and the quality of clinical care.

This case study will focus on how Pyxis Products uses Perforce SCM to effectively version and track development of over 40 projects.

Development Challenge

In 2004, Pyxis Products decided to replace MKS Source Integrity Standard Edition, the SCM system it had in place for several years. MKS had little support for branching and merging, no atomic transaction or exclusive file-locking systems, and was very slow.

"Our old system had quite a few deficiencies. Support for branching and merging was almost nonexistent. It was very time consuming in the midst of developing next-generation architecture for our future projects. We simply did not want to merge our files," said Nau. "MKS allowed teams to create projects on any file server they had 'write' access to. Consequently, our projects were spread throughout the organization, making backups very difficult. We realized we needed a new and better SCM solution to streamline development and centralize our source assets."

The Solution: Perforce is Flexible, Fast, and Easy-to-Use

Cardinal Health evaluated several SCM systems and found Perforce to be extremely flexible, fast, and easy to use.

Perforce is a very fine grained tool and makes it very easy to access files or make changes throughout the system," explained Nau. "All the features our previous SCM lacked were included in Perforce. For example, before, it took four to five minutes per developer to scan for changes, but Perforce is so fast that we could continue to work on developing our products instead of waiting or fixing issues of the previous SCM. No doubt, Perforce significantly improved our developers' productivity."

Nau continued, "Another important feature that appealed to everyone was how easy Perforce was to learn and use. The learning curve was so small that Perforce quickly became the tool everyone wanted to use."

Initially, the Pyxis division rolled out Perforce to a few development teams with about 25 users. As more teams tried Perforce, they quickly lined up to migrate their projects to Perforce.

Today, approximately 200 developers use Perforce to manage about 40 different Pyxis product lines. With continued recommendations from current users, non-technical teams, such as publications, are in the process of adopting Perforce as well. "Slowly the roll out to other teams will begin," said Nau.

Cardinal Health – Pyxis Products has four locations, with users in California, Texas, and Canada. The Perforce Proxy is used for distributed development, with the main server located in San Diego, California. "At any given time, someone is always accessing the Perforce Server. This would never have been possible with our previous tool. Perforce allows us to do true shared development across significant geographic distances," said Nau.

Ease of Administration

More than 500,000 files are currently under Perforce control, and 54,000 changes have been submitted. "Currently, three of us administer the Perforce system, which takes only about five percent of our time, allowing us to concentrate on other activities," added Nau.

Support on Christmas Eve Exemplifies Perforce Customer Commitment

"During our evaluation, we had heard from other customers that Perforce's support was second to none. But we didn't think much of it at the time, other than 'nice to know.'" "However, on Christmas Eve, about six months after we first went 'live,' we received a call that our Perforce Server was down. We sent an email to Perforce's support team and within minutes received a response. We were able to fix the problem and bring the server back online. We all had a merry Christmas.

"Such commitment is rare, especially during a holiday. And, ever since, we have been extremely pleased with the stellar support Perforce offers," said Nau. "With our previous SCM tool, it took three to five business days to even get a response. With Perforce we have never had a question go unanswered and we know from experience we can always count on quick, expert support."

Conclusion

"Perforce provides us with a stable and flexible SCM system that allows us to focus on developing products. Today approximately 200 users rely on Perforce with near zero downtime. The system is very robust and reliable, and we now realize first-hand the importance of stellar support," concluded Nau.

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