Electric Cloud Granted First and Only Technology Patent Enabling Massively Parallel Software Builds

Patented Technology Detects and Automatically Corrects for Hidden Dependencies

Mountain View, CA, May 16, 2006 — Electric Cloud today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted a patent on the Company's technology to enable massively parallel software builds. This patent is the first and only of its kind for technology that dramatically increases the speed of builds while dynamically managing dependencies to minimize broken builds.

This technology allows software development teams to distribute builds in a parallel fashion across a cluster of servers to speed overall build time while capturing and managing dependencies between files. By using this technology as part of the ElectricAccelerator solution, the Company's customers have seen speed improvements of up to 20 times over serial builds. Developer, QA, and release teams consequently spend significantly less time waiting for builds to finish, improving productivity and ultimately improving product quality.

Many attempts over the years have been made to distribute individual build steps in parallel to a cluster of machines, but there are significant issues around managing the dependencies that ultimately lead to broken builds. As a result, parallel or distributed builds are not in widespread enterprise use.

"This patent resulted from years of frustration over slow builds," said John Ousterhout, Electric Cloud founder and chairman. "We knew that reliable parallel builds could not be achieved without accurate dependency information, and we knew that it wasn't feasible to maintain dependencies manually. The breakthrough came when we realized that dependencies are a reflection of files being read and written, so if we just observed all of the file accesses during a build we could automatically compute perfect dependency information.

"Not only does this eliminate existing manual and semi-automatic approaches to dependency management, but it works independently of the particular applications that are reading and writing the files so it has broad applicability. With this technique we have been able to run massively parallel builds with complete reliability and safety."

The patent was granted for "a method for executing program builds" in a way that collects and analyzes file dependency information in a build file. This allows for scheduling and executing jobs for the build based on identified dependency information, and supplementing that with the actual file usage information.

John Ousterhout and his team were awarded a patent for this unique software build management technology. In addition to Ousterhout, the team who earned this patent included co-founder John Graham-Cumming and engineers Sven Delmas, Eric Melski, Usman Muzaffar, and Scott Stanton.

About Electric Cloud
Electric Cloud breaks the software build bottleneck, improving engineering productivity and helping teams maintain control over the development process in the face of ever-increasing product complexity and time-to-market pressures. Electric Cloud's patent-pending technology accelerates the development lifecycle with tools that reduce build times, make both full and incremental builds accurate, and provide the visibility teams need to continuously improve their build environment. The company's products are in use by leading enterprises such as Qualcomm, Intuit, and LSI Logic. Based in Mountain View, California, Electric Cloud is funded by top-tier venture firms, Mayfield, U.S. Venture Partners and RRE Ventures. For customer inquiries please contact Electric Cloud at (650) 968-2950 or www.electric-cloud.com.

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