Incremental Return on Incremental Investment:
Engenio’s Transition to Software Product Line Practice

Authors: William A. Hetrick, Engenio Information Technologies
Joseph G. Moore, Engenio Information Technologies
Charles W. Krueger, BigLever Software

Engenio made the transition to software product line practice in order to keep pace with growing business demand for its products. By using an incremental transition strategy, Engenio avoided the typical upfront adoption barrier – the equivalent development effort of 2 to 3 standalone products – which in their case was projected to be 900 to 1350 developer-months. Engenio discovered that by making an upfront investment of only 4 developer-months, they were able to start a chain reaction in which the incremental returns quickly outpaced the incremental investments.

Engenio Overview

Engenio is the recognized leader in the modular, high-performance disk storage systems industry. With a 20-year history of researching, developing, and manufacturing innovative storage solutions, Engenio is positioned in today’s market as the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and partner of choice for some of the largest information technology vendors and resellers in the world.

As a provider of feature-rich storage arrays to major OEM vendors – such as IBM, SGI, Cray, StorageTek and Teradata – Engenio’s engineering team faced significant challenges in leveraging their storage technology expertise across all products, while delivering unique and differentiated solutions for each customer. For Engenio, efficient product line engineering is mission critical for meeting its business goals. Furthermore, Engenio (formerly LSI Logic Storage Systems) is separating from its parent company, LSI Logic Corporation, and the ability to extend its product line to attract and retain a growing customer base is key for establishing investor value.

With approximately 200 developers across four locations, Engenio’s Controller Firmware Development team provides firmware for 82 products, with approximately one million lines of embedded software code for each product. Approximately 80% of the code is common among all products.

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