Sales

This section gives details about how to purchase BitMover's products. We offer a free, no obligation evaluation of our products and the evaluation can be conducted without any impact to your existing history or environment.

We offer a range of product purchasing options that can be tailored to your needs, whether you are a startup or a global enterprise. Licenses can be purchased or leased on an annual basis, with support and upgrades included in the annual licenses. Also, you can take advantage of various incentive programs that will decrease both risk and cost in your buying decision.

To request a quote or an evaluation key please fill out the license request form.

For information and assistance, please send a query to sales@bitmover.com or call BitMover at 888-401-8808.

Evaluation This section is a hyper link to here.

Do you need BK?

SCM systems are often a productivity bottleneck. Inexpensive entry level systems don't solve the problems you need solved. Traditional high end systems are resource and administration intensive. BitKeeper is light, fast, and exceptionally simple to use, yet it offers advanced features not found in even the most expensive traditional systems.

• Productivity
  BitKeeper is a developer's tool, it puts more power in the hands of the developer while allowing enough structure to manage your projects. BitKeeper's peer-to-peer and replicated architecture spreads the load over all your machines, significantly reducing server and network bottlenecks. BitKeeper provides a full suite of features to speed up all of the operations that your developers use most frequently.

• Reliability
  BitKeeper performs regular consistency checks without having to take your system offline. BitKeeper's architecture allows your developers to continue working locally with full functionality even if your server goes down or you experience a network outage. And it provides inherent backups through replication. It is possible and easy to guarantee 24x7 uptime with BitKeeper.

• Flexibility
  BitKeeper is a peer-to-peer system, that seamlessly supports customized work flows. Whether a small or large shop, BitKeeper can adapt to your development process and then grow with you as your needs change. BitKeeper's Delta Development model epitomizes the flexibility and scalability that is achievable with our peer-to-peer architecture.

• Total cost of ownership
  The total cost of an SCM solution goes far beyond the price of the software. With many tools, the real cost lies in administration, hardware, support, and professional services. With BitKeeper those costs are negligible. The replicated nature of BitKeeper means that a PC will work fine and there is no need for full-time admins. A small and cheap PC can easily support thousands of developers. It would cost more than a hundred times as much to do the same thing with other SCM solutions.

• Support
  Our support is without equal in the industry, we are responsive and will work with you to deploy BitKeeper effectively, at no extra charge. BitMover does not have multiple layers of support, you can talk directly to an engineer that can solve your issues. Our customers frequently describe our support as the best they've ever received.

• Remote/distributed development
  With centralized client/server SCM systems, all remote people and teams suffer. BitKeeper is a peer-to-peer system based on a replicated database. All teams become local and enjoy local performance in a replicated system.

• Merging
  BitKeeper's ProMerge has best-in-class merge algorithms and merge tools which reduce merge time to 1/10th of the time required by other tools. Many customers claim that the man hours savings in merging alone more than covers the software cost.

• Reproducibility
  BitKeeper guarantees 100% accurate rollback of all file contents, names, and permissions without requiring any forethought on your part. While other systems require that you remember to tag the tree, BitKeeper has no such requirement; all changes are potential rollback points.

• Reviewing and debugging code
  BitKeeper maintains more history detail with more accuracy than any other tool currently available. We also have a suite of tools that allow you to get a quick picture of your development history at a high level and instantly delve into specific detail.

• Renames
  BitKeeper gets this right, files may be renamed at any time, in any work space, and the renames are handled correctly in all cases.

If you are interested in enjoying the benefits of BitKeeper please request a quote or an evaluation key through our online request form. For information and assistance, you may also send a query to sales@bitmover.com or call BitMover at 888-401-8808.

How to buy

BitKeeper prices depend on a variety of factors including which products you choose, whether you choose to lease or buy, and the number of licenses you need. The total cost of SCM includes more than just seat price. The full set of costs are discussed in our total cost of ownership section which demonstrates how BitKeeper can be significantly less expensive than any other offering, free or commercial.

We offer two different methods for licensing BitKeeper, allowing you to choose which method best fits your business requirements.

Buy option: this is the traditional way of purchasing software, you pay a one time fee and have the right to use that version of the software indefinitely. This model includes the first year of support and maintenance, with additional years available for a yearly fee.

Lease option: this is the new preferred model in the software industry. Leasing has become very attractive with software buyers who see the advantage of smaller annual payments, included support, and included upgrades. This means you can always get the latest version without having to retire your old software and buy it again every year or two. This option has proven to be quite popular with our customers because it is substantially less than the purchase price and is paid annually.

BitKeeper can be purchased in the following packages:

To request a quote or an evaluation key, please fill out the license request form.

For information and assistance, please send a query to sales@bitmover.com or call BitMover at 888-401-8808.

Cost of ownership

The total cost of ownership of any SCM product needs to be balanced against the benefits in order to make an informed purchasing decision. While it is usual to consider only the software costs, doing so can lead to an inaccurate view, resulting in unpleasant surprises down the road. The real cost of ownership is the sum of:

• Licensing costs
• Hardware costs
• Human costs

All of these need to be assessed in order to see the true cost of any system. For some products, it turns out that the people and hardware costs dwarf the cost of the software.

The following chart quickly illustrates hidden costs of other SCM products.

COSTS	OTHER SCM	BITKEEPER
Software licenses	$-$$$$	$$$
Setup	$$-$$$$$	$
Hardware	$$$-$$$$$	$
Administration	$$-$$$$$	$
Third party databases (if needed)	$$$$	0

Licensing costs. Paid BitKeeper licenses are needed for each person who uses the software to make changes of any kind. Read-only users (people browsing the source, tracking progress, doing builds, etc.) still need a license but there is no charge for that license. In general, our software delivers productivity increases and time savings far in excess of the annual lease investment.

Hardware costs. Software requires hardware, and SCM software has traditionally required a great deal of hardware. Consider that virtually all other SCM systems have a centralized design where the SCM system runs on a single server. The performance of that server is a function of the server itself and the number of concurrent users. If there is only one user, a modest server will perform quite well, but as the number of users increases, the hardware must also be improved or performance becomes unacceptable. Unfortunately, the cost of performance is not linear. A system which is twice as fast is rarely only twice as costly, and a system which is ten times as fast is always much more than ten times as much.

The problem is obvious, a centralized SCM system will add hardware costs at what can be an exponential rate as the number of users increases. This translates into reasonable costs for 5-10 users and unreasonable costs for 100-1000 users.

BitKeeper does not have this problem because of its distributed model. The main repository is rarely used, work takes place in the child or grandchild repositories and then fans into the main repository. This model means that the hardware costs can be spread over a set of inexpensive PCs rather than a $300,000 SMP machine. BitMover hosts repositories used by thousands of developers on a single inexpensive server.

Human costs. Many SCM systems have traditionally required an administrator for every 10-20 users. These administrators are critical when the SCM is a centralized single point of failure. If an administrator costs $200,000 (salary, benefits, and other overhead) and one is needed for every 20 users, that is a not-so-hidden additional cost of $10,000/user/year. One may argue that a well run installation could do better, perhaps one administrator per 100 users, but that is still an additional $2,000/user/year. BitKeeper eliminates the need for an administrator, it has no single point of failure. The savings realized by not needing an administrator to nursemaid the SCM server will easily cover 100% of the cost of BitKeeper.

Note that an administrator is not the same as a project lead who defines and controls policy in the repositories; all development efforts of any size will need people in that role and no SCM system can remove that requirement. An administrator is the person who makes sure that the hardware and the software is working, the repositories are backed up, etc. The distributed nature of BitKeeper removes the need for such a person.