Welcome to the new face of GitEnterprise.com !

GitEnterprise is different, not only in his new external facing web-site but also deep inside in his mission and focus.

We have been providing cloud and hosted services powered by gitent-scm.com to provide a superior support for repository management, users and groups security and full audit-trail for around 2 years: now is time to make a bit leap forward.

One size does not fit all enterprises.

Can one solution be good enough for companies of all sizes ? We thought that we could build that solution and we started proposing our product in both hosted and cloud deployments for all our customers: over 7000 users registered to gitent-scm.com and created more than 10,000 repositories.

First phase of Git adoption is very much about discovery and gitent-scm.com has been a straightforward way to explore some enterprise-features such as role-based access control and branch-level security.

Once companies become familiar with Git and its usage in the Enterprise, the adoption really starts with the identification and exploration of the functional and ICT Security requirements needed by the organisation: different companies do have different requirements and integration with different systems.

Individual contractors.

The smallest of the Enterprises is the one-man-band where a single contractor is engaged by different companies for different projects. No specific requirements are needed other than private repositories with regular security and backup; Git Server is best hosted in the Cloud as minimises maintenance and operations costs whilst reducing risks of personal hardware failure.

Even though gitent-scm.com could be a cost-effective solution, it is possibly too complicated as RBAC and branch-level security are not needed and could be seen as repository administration burden.

We designed a “all-in-one” Git Server solution to combine ease of administration and personal security and confidentiality: his name is Git-in-a-box and requires no installation or administration, just download and use it.

Hosted: get Git-in-a-box and execute on your favourite Server to have a fully features Git Server without hassles.

Cloud: Git-in-a-box can be used in any private Cloud Server and can use any sort of Cloud storage backup. When a FREE Cloud Solution is required, the only choice on the market is BitBucket.org that offers privacy and space at no charge.

Small to medium Enterprises.

Teams are typically co-located in a single Office and additional requirements start to become recommended if not mandatory depending on the industry sector.

Most companies can still have a Git Server hosted in the Cloud without breaking any specific company policy whilst others such as Finance Software Development companies have stricter requirements to address their internal auditing constraints.

Cloud: when cost reduction is the main focus and source-code is not subject to strict ICT Security requirements, gitent-scm.com can be a good compromise as it provides 10-users / 1 GByte FREE Subscription with added Role-based Access Control and Web-based audit-trail. Security administration is easy and users can be self-provisioned and invited to join the company domain later on.

Hosted: for small companies without specific security requirements, Git-in-a-box is still our favourite choice of simplicity and functionality. Companies working in the Finance sector anyway have additional ICT Security requirements that involve compliance with SOX / PCI regulations. GerritForge is a cost-effective solution to provide governance, audit and integration with existing ICT Security assets such as LDAP User-registry and password enforcement and producing audit-trails for compliance inspections and reports.

Large Enterprises.

Teams can be even huge and distributed over the globe: they include developers with different skills-set and level of maturity of the adoption of Git as SCM tool. Most of them are possibly coming from a Subversion or SourceSafe background and need a more user-friendly and safer interface to Git.

100% pure Cloud hosting is typically not an option whilst some of them may want to use a more flexible hybrid-cloud model combining a traditional data-center hosting with additional private clouds located in remote geographical locations to reduce latency on remote sites.

The following key requirements become mandatory for a corporate adoption:

• Integration with Corporate User-registry such as corporate LDAP and Directory Services.
• Single-Sign-On with existing authentication system and credentials.
• Reuse of existing Corporate roles in the definition of the access control to Git repositories.
• Git over HTTP/S for SSL and X.509 Certificate validation.
• Full tamper-proof audit-trail of every operation triggered either via Web UI or Git client.
• Delegation of control across your organisation.
• High-availability of both Web/Git Services and data-storage.
• Multi-site replication across all the Corporate offices.
• 24×7 Support on the full Git stack.
• Existing rock-solid user base and Corporate reference in the same Business area.
• Integration with existing Corporate Workflow and Application Lifecycle Tools

Git was not designed to fulfil all of those Enterprise requirements, most Cloud or Hosted Services such as GitHub:Enterprise or Atlassian Stash provides coverage for only some of them such as LDAP integration and could be accepted in some departments with reserve from Corporate Security. gitent-scm.com and Git-in-a-box are definitely not the solution either as do not support full multi-site replication or workflow and ALM integration.

The only solution on the market is Gerrit Code Review: it has been designed and implemented by Google for the distributed and collaborative development of the Android OS, based on ashes of Guido Van Rossum’s experiment named Google Mondrian Code Review.

Gerrit Code Review is the only Git Enterprise tool adopted on a large scale by Companies such as SONY, Garmin, Qalcomm, SAP, Intel, HP, Deusche Bank and the list is growing on a daily basis.

Starting from Gerrit 2.5, announced @GooglePlex in Mountain View in November 2012, Gerrit is now extensible and can be integrated then with other tools and issue-tracking systems. We demoed the integration between GitBlit and Gerrit whilst providing full access to the OpenSource community to our Atlassian Jira integration.

GerritForge hosted is the Enterprise version of Google Gerrit Code Review with all the additional Enterprise Integrations you need to provide RBAC, Auditing and Application Lifecycle and Workflow.

GerritForge added the “missing pieces” for plugging it into a Corporate Environment:

• Issue tracking association and enforcement
• Workflow definition and automation
• Tamper-proof audit-trail
• 24×7 Support on the full Git and Gerrit software stack
• Single-sign-on and 3rd party authentication plugins, such as CollabNet TeamForge.
• Formal native packaging and installation procedure.
• Access to ad-hoc patches for production issues even on older branches and releases.

We do believe so much in Gerrit that we have rebuilt all our product offering using Gerrit as foundation:

Git-in-a-box is a Gerrit 2.5 engine with an HTML5 / RESTFul API layer to provide ease-of-use and plug&play installation.

gitent-scm.com is a Gerrit 2.2.2 engine with a JavaEE WebUI for automating common administration tasks.

GerritForge is Google Gerrit, with the same core code-base and version numbering.

Want to know more on Google Gerrit ?

For an initial introduction, the Google Gerrit Code Review Wikipedia page is the best place to start.

More detailed Wiki and project information can be found at Google Gerrit Code Review home page.