Will new Krugle code-finding appliance be cool?

Meeting people who develop new products and start up companies is a fun thing to do at a show. AT LinuxWorld 2007 in San Francisco this week, I talked with Laura Merling of Krugle Inc. about Krugle Enterprise Appliance, which is in beta now and heading for release within weeks.  Krugle has made a code search engine for in-house and independent enterprise-level software development. This code search system searches across heterogenous code repositories amd other tools in the development lifecycle. Merling says it can also be used as a watchdog. Merling told me that the appliance can be used to track progress on projects, for one thing. For instance, she’d talked with a company that had hired a firm to do some development work and got burned. A week before the code-freeze deadline, the company demanded that the outsourcer show what had been done and found that only a bit of the project had been done. 

“They had been fooled because they could see that updates had been made to a massive number of files, making it look like lots was going on. When they actually went in and looked at the changes, they saw it had been things doing a global change, replace on the logo.  Needless to say, the release date was missed.”

In my view, Krugle’s appliance could help software developers. To succeed in the enterprise IT department space, however, the marketing team will need to get traction with companies that develop their own apps in house, which are usually larger firms. The big question: Is tracking code a big problem for these companies?