CAST (company)

CAST is a technology corporation headquartered in New York City and France, near Paris. It was founded in 1990 in Paris, France, by Vincent Delaroche.

CAST
TypePrivate
IndustryISV
FoundedNovember 1990, in Paris, France
FounderVincent Delaroche
HeadquartersEU Hqs: Meudon near Paris
US Hqs: New York City
Key people
Vincent Delaroche, Chairman and CEO,
Bill Curtis, Chief Scientist,
Ernie Hu, Chief Operating Officer,
Alexandre Rerolle, group CFO
ProductsCAST Highlight
CAST Imaging
OwnerBridgepoint Group (2022-present)
Number of employees
380 (2019)
Websitewww.castsoftware.com

The firm markets products that generate software intelligence, with a technology based on semantic analysis of software source code and components. In addition, CAST offers hosting and consulting services.

On May 18, 2022, the company and Bridgepoint Group announced entering into exclusive negotiations for the acquisition by Bridgepoint Development Capital funds of a majority stake in CAST to support the development of the Software intelligence market in the coming decade.[1]

On July 21, 2022, Bridgepoint Group acquired a majority stake, while Vincent Deleroche rolled over the majority of his shares and the management invested into the new holding, Financière Da Vinci alongside Bridgepoint Group and Vincent Delaroche. Following the transaction, Vincent Delaroche and the executive team in place have continued to manage the company's activities as President of Financière Da Vinci and CEO of CAST.[2]

History

CAST was founded in 1990 in Paris by Vincent Delaroche. In 1996, it shipped its first software product based on semantic analysis of code. CAST Application Intelligence Platform (CAST AIP), was first launched in 2004, initially introducing software quality measurement. In 2012, the firm announced support for the Object Management Group (OMG) Automated Function Point (AFP) Standard,[3] one way of measuring application development productivity.

In 2017, CAST Highlight is launched as a SaaS product scanning portfolio of software to provide metrics on health, cloud migration capabilities, and Open-source license risks.

In early 2019, CAST AIP is re-branded and becomes CAST Imaging, a product representing graphically the inner-working of software systems.

The firm's leadership includes Bill Curtis, who developed the Capability Maturity Model at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in the early 1990s and then the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ).

CAST's head of product development, Olivier Bonsignour, co-wrote a book with Capers Jones.[4]

Products

CAST provides 2 sets of products of different technologies, pricing, implementation models, and usage: CAST Highlight and CAST Imaging.

CAST Highlight

CAST Highlight is a SaaS product for performing rapid application portfolio analysis. It analyzes the source code of applications to assess their cloud readiness,[5] technical debt, Open-source risks, and computes a green index. Software insights collected from the source code analysis may also be correlated with built-in qualitative surveys for adding business context insights on top of technical information.

CAST Imaging

CAST Imaging reverse-engineers all database structures, code components, and interdependencies in custom-built applications. It provides interactive architecture blueprints, data-call graphs, and end-to-end transaction flows in a Web application with the ability to export details externally.[6] CAST Imaging’s ability to ‘understand’ the application inner workings, and map the internal dependencies between all its elements, allows it to also identify structural flaws standardized by ISO (ISO-5055) and classified under Robustness, Efficiency (performance, consumption), Security and Maintainability.[7]

Research

The firm's Research Labs subsidiary developed a repository of industry data and issued a biennial report called CAST Research on Application Software Health (CRASH). CRASH data has been cited and published in articles in IEEE Software and research.[8] Its Labs were active in analyzing the phenomenon of technical debt, co-hosting a research forum on this topic with the University of Maryland’s department of information systems.[9][10]

Technical debt focused on analyzing applications instead of technology layers and as a consequence, most of the research had been conducted in the domain of inter- and intra-technology dependency analysis.[11]

References
  1. "Entrée en négociations exclusives des principaux actionnaires de CAST avec une société contrôlée par Bridgepoint SAS en vue de l'acquisition par les fonds Bridgepoint Development Capital d'une participation majoritaire dans CAST, suivie d'une offre". Actusnews Wire (in French). Retrieved 2023-01-23.
  2. "Completion of a majority stake acquisition of Cast by Bridgepoint". Actusnews Wire. Retrieved 2022-12-16.
  3. "OMG Adopts Automated Function Point Specification, January 17, 2013". Archived from the original on 2013-05-09. Retrieved 2013-06-23.
  4. Jones, Capers; Bonsignour, Olivier (2011). The Economics of Software Quality. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-132-58220-9.
  5. Ramchand, Kent; Baruwal Chhetri, Mohan; Kowalczyk, Ryszard (Jan 2021). "Enterprise adoption of cloud computing with application portfolio profiling and application portfolio assessment". Journal of Cloud Computing. 10 (1). doi:10.1186/s13677-020-00210-w. S2CID 256237745.
  6. Lloyd, Jeremy (Dec 2022). Infrastructure Leader's Guide to Google Cloud: Lead Your Organization's Google Cloud Adoption, Migration and Modernization Journey. UK: Apress, Berkeley, CA. p. 169-180. doi:10.1007/978-1-4842-8820-7_15. ISBN 978-1-4842-8819-1.
  7. Curtis, Bill; Martin, Robert; Douziech, Philippe-Emmanuel (March 2022). "Measuring the Structural Quality of Software Systems". Computer. IEEE. 55 (3): 87–90. doi:10.1109/MC.2022.3145265. S2CID 247492481.
  8. Plösch, Reinhold; Bräuer, Johannes; Saft, Matthias; Körner, Christian (May 2018). "Design debt prioritization". Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt. IEEE. pp. 95–104. doi:10.1145/3194164.3194172. ISBN 978-1-4503-5713-5. S2CID 50772086.
  9. "Java apps have most flaws, Cobol apps the least, study finds". Computer World. December 8, 2011.
  10. "Bad code plagues business applications, especially Java ones". ars technica. December 8, 2011.
  11. Ernst, N. A.; Bellomo, S.; Ozkaya, I.; Nord, R. L. (April 2017). "What to Fix? Distinguishing between Design and Non-design Rules in Automated Tools". 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA). IEEE. pp. 165–168. arXiv:1705.11087. doi:10.1109/ICSA.2017.25. ISBN 978-1-5090-5729-0. S2CID 27116442.
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