MKS Wins Federated Contract

As part of its plan to consolidate use of four independent version-control tools, Federated Insurance Companies (Owatonna, MN) has awarded a contract to MKS Inc. (Waterloo, ON) for use of its MKS Source Integrity Enterprise for software configuration management.

Before seeking this solution, according to Dale Phiefer, senior programmer analyst, Federated Insurance Companies, the carrier asked itself, "Is it really smart to have four different version control tools in your organization or should we be looking at one enterprisewide solution?" Version control software provides a database that is used to keep track of the revisions made to a program by programmers and developers.

Federated decided upon MKS' solution after evaluating it, as well as products from three other vendors, in terms of functionality and list price. Federated also mapped out some of its worst-case scenarios and brought the vendors on-site to evaluate how they would handle such situations.

"MKS had the simplest solution that met Federated's functional need without overkill," says Phiefer. Also," it happened to be the most cost effective."