We previously used a clunky system that required logging on to AWS IAM before reaching out to the CodeArtifacts and it would then expire after 12 hours. This required additional maintenance for developers so we were looking for a more efficient solution. Nexus provides a single sign-on that doesn't expire unless you change your password. The developer logs in once for the entire day which increases efficiency and helps the developer to more easily maintain the workflow.

The key benefit we get from it is speed to delivery. It has improved our overall time to get new applications out with new code. That's true whether from a platform perspective, where we are quickly deploying up-to-date Docker containers, or whether we are looking to deploy new code out to deliver a new application. That whole release cycle is vastly improved. The way we've automated a lot of our processing, particularly with us being very much a cloud-centric organization, it helps with our ability to deliver code and then scale out as we need to.

Initially, we did a deal with Sonatype to get a small number going to see what the general, intangible benefits were. The developers were certainly happy with the way our product was working. And then there was fact that we had more control of it, being on a computer on somebody's desk, that it was more centrally managed. I do have a really strong feeling that if we took it away, overall productivity would drop off. How much? I don't know but it certainly would drop off. We would probably lose people as well, since they like the tool.

We did a survey, a tool-chain analysis across the whole company, because we've got many different tools doing all sorts of similar things. At the top of the chart, in terms of people loving them, across the business — in particular the developers — were GitLab and Nexus. Nexus Repository is seen as a key, useful, strategic tool that we use here.

It works well together with the Nexus IQ. We can check our incoming artifacts from third parties with the help of the Nexus Secure server, which correlates with the Nexus support.

And we can provide good results or products to customers where they can download it from there and bring it into production on servers or something like that. So it's everything in this field.

Regarding Nexus Repository Manager, using the product has allowed us to have an official and strong repository that is able to store and to manage access rights regarding the sharing of our components among the different teams. We have teams spread across multiple sites in multiple countries.

Regarding Nexus IQ, it has helped us a lot with the management of our OSS licenses and with our knowledge of the licenses and the vulnerabilities. It has also helped us with knowledge of the libraries that are embedded in our products and to build a bill of materials for our projects. In this regard it has been very relevant for us.

We have found the tools integrate well with our existing DevOps tools. In fact, we built our DevOps tools over the last two or three years now and, as both Nexus Repository Manager and Nexus IQ were already available when we started to build our development chain, we had the opportunity to integrate them fully into our build generation. It's been of high value for us. We have gained a lot of time by avoiding old installations and all the sharing management is provided by Nexus Repository Manager. As we already used the tools, we built our DevOps around them.

In terms of open-source intelligence and policy enforcement across our SDLC, before using Nexus IQ in particular, we were struggling to provide a bill of materials for our products. It was up to the development team to maintain the list of dependencies that were embedded in the projects. We know that, with the human factor, sometimes some libraries were forgotten in the list. We also had some problems identifying the licenses of the difference embedded libraries that were in our products. That could have resulted in legal problems when we deployed our products because we had some licensing problems. Since deploying Nexus IQ, we have deployed and customized the policies for our company.

We had a big gap, and then a big increase, in knowledge of our tools and also in our knowledge of the licenses that are embedded in our products. We have all the knowledge needed to be able to waive all the policies and programs that we may have on our products. It's really a big benefit for us deploying Nexus IQ.

Finally, it has increased developer productivity across several projects on the order of ten to 15 percent.

On the hosted repository, if a team inserts a version of a library, say a Spring library, it becomes available across the organization. If our organization has between ten and 20 development teams, if you upload one library it becomes available to everyone. That helps the speed of development.

Or, for example, with the infrastructure, we have to bring our software version to a certain level. Let's say decision a decision has been made that every everybody is moving to Spring version 5.0. Our DevOps team uploads the library to Nexus and then it's available across the organization.

It improves productivity.

First of all, we now have a well-documented process on where to find any build result produced within the last two years. This documentation has been made available to the whole company. Previously, we had several platforms. The results were sitting in some continuous integration system while build results for other teams were hosted on a shared drive, etc.

It has helped us reduce the effort in maintaining several systems. That is a huge benefit. We only have to maintain one system and we can use this system concisely across several locations. It has saved time tremendously. As a rough approximation, I would say we only use 20 percent of the administration time we used previously, so it's saving us 80 percent. And storage management has been simplified so we have been able to reduce hardware resources and backup processes. On the hardware side, as a guess, we have saved 30 to 40 percent compared to what we used previously. It's very substantial.

It has enhanced the pipeline. It's a critical part of the DevOps infrastructure.

The product helped our organization improve runtime efficiency. We do not have to connect third-party vendors while building external packages or storing container-approved images. It allows end-to-end life cycle accessibility.

It has really sanitized our development lifecycle because we know where people will store their software, and we have a clear naming convention for this. Before that, people would store software in various places, on network drives, on random computers, and it was not obvious where things would be.

It has improved the organization in that it has helped us ensure that developers are utilizing the safe, open-source components we provide to them. We know who they are, through the use of the Nexus software, when they took them, and where they're being used. It has helped us to increase the security of our applications.

We use it for open-source governance, that's one of its every day uses. We have so many applications and so many services.