ionForge Creates New Unit To Address Needs of Entertainment and Media Developers

ionForge Creates New Unit To Address Needs of Entertainment and Media Developers


Irvine, CA – June 1, 2005,

ionForge (http://www.ionforge.com), creators of the source control and asset management solution ‘Evolution’, announced today the creation of an Entertainment and Media Division. The ionForge Entertainment and Media Division will focus on continuing ionForge’s expansion into the digital asset management market. The digital asset management market includes industries such as game development, animation, motion picture / feature film special effects and television special effects.

Lucas Heneks was hand picked by ionForge Chief Technology Officer Nick Ni to lead the Entertainment and Media Division. Lucas Heneks was the natural choice to lead ionForge’s continuing efforts to address the specific needs of creative teams. Heneks was instrumental in developing two of Evolution’s latest advancements that has set Evolution years ahead of other digital asset management solutions.

Several weeks ago ionForge released Evolution 2.3 with imageDiff™. Evolution’s new image difference tool allows developers to detect even small changes in an image when they compare two versions. By allowing development teams, including graphic artists, developers, and project managers, to track changes in images through the life of a project, Evolution's image difference tool will help ensure that projects are completed accurately as well as on time and on budget.

Heneks was also directly involved in expanding Evolution’s capacity to handle large media and digital assets. Creative development teams are working with larger and larger files – sometimes terabytes of data. Unlike other configuration management tools, Evolution is not limited by the size of the source files and can handle the demands of today's imaging professionals.

“Lucas has consistently proven his commitment to entertainment and media developers. Most recently, he led the development of imageDiff, our pixel by pixel image diffing and comparison tool,” stated Nick Ni, ionForge CTO. “Lucas’ dedication to entertainment developers will be invaluable as ionForge continues to bring productivity improvements and resulting cost savings to the digital asset management market as they have for traditional software professionals.“

The ionForge Entertainment and Media Division will be increasing its efforts to work directly with select creative teams to identify and address their specific digital asset management needs. As part of this effort, ionForge will be expanding its progressive developer outreach program. ionForge has long been committed to giving back to the developer community – through its support of organizations like International Game Developer Association and participation with GameDev.net and Devmaster.com.


The Evolution Story
(http://www.ionforge.com/products/evolution/)

Evolution was born out of our own team's real-life frustrations with the limitations of existing source control solutions, spanning from free products to outrageously priced software.
As a veteran developer himself, Nick Ni knows first hand the frustration of team software developing without proper processes. Data corruption, file collisions, and accurate project analysis are just some of the challenges that both managers and developers face when developing without a Source Control Management tool. Source Control Management is a central tool that allows developers to accurately control their source code, while allowing management to ensure project benchmarks are achieved on time.

Fueled by their frustration with existing Source Control Management solutions, Ni and his team of developers created Evolution, a robust Source Control Management tool that addresses many of the issues developers face today. Realizing that the goals of project managers often conflict with the processes of developers, Ni and his team built Evolution with advanced features that harmonize the efforts of these disparate groups.

http://www.ionforge.com/products/evolution/

As our own customers, ionForge developed Evolution as the solution all of our team members would want and need to use.
• Our developers needed convenient features to make their everyday tasks faster and easier, as well as the ability to abide by corporate policy without being bogged down by the burdens of tedious duties.
• Our build engineers complained about the difficulties of creating scheduled daily builds.
• Our project managers and architects needed more sophisticated mechanisms to represent the complexities of designing and managing a project from conception to gold and beyond.
The answer to all these woes lay in source control.

In our research, we realized the crux of the issue was that source control was still viewed as nothing more than a method of backup. It was time for source control to evolve beyond this basic idea of a simple repository.
ABOUT ionForge (http://www.ionforge.com)

Founded in 2001, ionForge is committed to providing innovative solutions for the common problems encountered by software development teams.

Based in Orange County, California – ionForge is focused on providing their clients with
• An immediate return on investment.
• Minimal transitional costs.
• Long-term value.
ionForge is committed to delivering solutions that solve problems immediately, require no downtime and have little learning curve, and provide obvious value in both the medium and long term.

Mission Statement
ionForge's mission is to increase the productivity of software development teams worldwide by providing solutions to the real problems they face both on a day-to-day basis and in the long term. Through innovative technology, creative thinking, and exceptional customer service, ionForge will solve the complex issues of large enterprises at a cost that teams of any size can afford.


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