LiveRebel Gives Up on the Ghost

Java toolmaker ZeroTurnaround's software release automation tool, LiveRebel, is a little less live than it was a week ago. The company pulled the plug on the three-year-old sibling of its JRebel JVM plug-in (and newly birthed XRebel Java profiler). Company founder and CEO Jevgeni Kabanov, delivered the news in a blog post, though he says customers were contacted before he posted.

I caught up with Kabanov via Skype in Estonia, where his company is headquartered, to ask him about it. He said there just wasn't enough of a mid-range release management market to sustain the product.

"LiveRebel was aimed at the mid-market," he said. "That's a few dozen up to a couple hundred servers. But most of our competitors were going after customers with hundreds to thousands of servers. We just felt that there was a significant opportunity cost for going after that market."

Another problem, Kabanov said he believes, is that there is no agreement currently on exactly what a "release management" product should do -- especially within the context of a rapidly evolving of DevOps and continuous delivery movements. But perhaps more important, whatever release management is, it doesn't currently seem to be at the top of ZT's customers' to do lists. In his blog post, he put it this way: "Release management provides little value if you don't have automated builds, provisioning, and a well-defined release process, and unfortunately most potential customers would have none of those."

"It was a tough decision emotionally, but from a business perspective, it was quite straight forward," he said. "For now, we're continuing to focus on the developer tools market, which is our strength. But we're not closing any doors on what we might do in the future."

LiveRebel 1.0 was released in May 2011 after about three years of development "in the far northern country of Estonia as an attempt to re-invent product updates." The final version, 3.1, was released last month. Kabanov said active customers would be getting refunds and support and help migrate off LiveRebel until August 2015.

The Tartu, Estonia-based company is probably best known for its JRebel plug-in, which integrates with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and app servers on the class loader level, and allows developers to make on-the-fly code changes in Java class files. In June, the company released an interactive Java profiler called XRebel. The company also operates a research and content organization, Rebel Labs, which publishes free, vendor-neutral technical resources.

Posted by John K. Waters on August 13, 2014