Founding Year: 2015
Website: https://marvelution.com/
“I enjoy coding and want to get all the little details right. Jenkins Integration for Jira is one such example. It started with solving my own problem,” says Mark Rekveld, Founder of Marvelution.
Inception of Marvelution
Marvelution is a software company that simplifies Jenkins integration in Jira. It was founded as a result of Mark’s inclination to deal with complex issues and make them as simple and effective as possible. Mark, a code geek, software developer, designer, and solution architect, worked with several major firms in the industry like Oracle, BEA, IBM, SAP, and Siebel after his graduation in 2007. During his time working with these firms, he realized that open-source was not used in projects even though they offered better and faster support as compared to the software from big players in the industry.
Mark took it upon himself to come up with open-source solutions that can help him implement a different style of integration between Jenkins and Jira. Eventually, he started helping many companies in their development and offering support to customers. And that marked the beginning of Marvelution. However, the company was formally established in late 2015 following the wide adoption of the software that happened over quite a short time.
Overcoming the Challenges
Marvelution was a humble attempt by Mark to hone his development skills. Although Marvelution saw a swift success in the initial times, making the transition from an open-source umbrella project to getting established as a company was tough.
One of the major challenges that Marvelution had, as Mark recalls, was to find a license model for all the open-source projects undertaken under the business name. So far, Mark handled every project under Marvelution by creating and maintaining them for free. But now, Mark had to figure out a way to develop a sustainable business model that could generate profits to grow Marvelution while also taking care not to force-feed the licensed model to its customers.
Eventually, Mark succeeded in overcoming this challenge. He developed different offerings for the projects that were inherited while keeping true to their origin of open-source free software. This opened up new avenues and scope to explore while also generating revenues and adding new solutions as software features for their clients.
Unique Offerings Customized to Meet Customer Demands
The solution provided by Marvelution to integrate Jira and Jenkins is based on the premise that Jira holds the standard framework for integrating the build results in Jenkins into the views of issues in Jira.
Other solution providers tend to configure the integration and behavior within the build configuration of each job in Jenkins. As a result, numerous jobs have to be configured to share results with Jira including the credentials needed to push build results to Jira.
The single source of truth solution of the Jenkins Integration for Jira app allows administrators to configure the integration once, and after that, Jenkins pushes data to Jira. Then Jira handles processing the results to make sure the necessary actions are taken.
One of the primary reasons why Marvelution’s services are unique is it focuses on customizing the solution to fit the client’s needs and changing demands. While competitors use issue comments to link Jenkins builds to Jira issues, Marvelution uses custom view elements added to Jira to show this information. The advantage of this is these comments don’t get cluttered and customer/user comments can be easily found.
Moreover, Marvelution has also developed an automation engine that allows administrators to configure a rule that should be executed when a build or job is synchronized to Jira. It allows you to simply create, and release a version in Jira if the release build was successful, or automatically transition an issue if a developer is working on it.
Marvelution spearheads the companies providing Jira solutions due to many reasons, one of them being driver feedback Marvelution receives from their customers. This can be both bug reports and feature requests and is then mixed with their out-of-the-box thinking and unique ideas for products and services. Another deciding factor is technical advancements and changes needed to make sure the products and services keep performing to the high standard set by Marvelution.
Adapting To the Shift to The Cloud
There’s nothing new about it, but the shift to cloud computing continues to grow. Initially, most of the customers that Marvelution catered to were depending on server or data center deployments to run their business operations. Looking at the scenario today, more and more customers are moving to the cloud not just because they realize the benefits it offers but because they are forced to move in the direction their software vendors are heading.
Within this trend of shifting to the cloud, Mark also saw that most features were cloud-first and some were cloud-only. To build a strong differentiating factor, Mark ensured that the features are released to the cloud first since it has a faster release cycle and also followed up with a release that customers can use on their server and data center deployments.
The Jenkins Jira Integration product is the oldest product Marvelution has that started in 2008 as a hobby project. Over its lifespan, the product has seen 3-4 rewrites to overcome using the product at ever larger scales. After years of development experience with Jenkins and Jira, the product has turned into a robust solution that works very well in even the largest scaled customers.
Meet The Trailblazer
Mark Rekveld
Mark is the Founder of Marvelution. After finishing his bachelor’s degree in Informatics, Mark focused on Java software development & matured with a passion for lean development and open-source software. His passion and love for coding and urge to simplify the complexity led to Marvelution.“Marvelution’s services are unique and custom-made to their client’s needs and changing demands, truly setting them apart from the competition in the market.”
