Electric Cloud recently closed a second round of US$12 million Series E funding. So what is it doing with the money?

The continuous delivery software company today announced two new products—ElectricAccelerator Huddle and ElectricFlow—to fill out its enterprise-scale build-test-deploy continuous delivery platform. Huddle is a free tool for build-test automation, and ElectricFlow is a suite of applications for next-generation UIs that run atop the company’s flagship Electric Commander DevOps process automation platform.

“It’s all about automation and accelerating the software delivery process,” said CEO Steve Brodie, who joined the 12-year-old company in 2012. “You need to identify the bottlenecks and remove them. That’s where build acceleration comes in.”

Huddle, currently in public beta, is a “freemium” version of the company’s ElectricAccelerator tool for build automation. “Build and test can take hours,” Brodie said. “The only way to achieve continuous delivery of software is you have to automate and accelerate.”

Huddle parallelizes builds and tests to run on unused desktop CPU capacity within a group of developers, reducing cycle times. “It’s kind of like SETI,” Brodie said. “We’re using idle CPU cycles to accelerate build cycles.” Huddle allows teams to run builds and tests on up to eight local cores, or enables parallelization across multiple machines up to a limited number of hours, the company said in its announcement.

ElectricFlow consists of three applications that facilitate DevOps: one for build and test, a new one (Deploy) for deployment, and one for pipeline management and visibility. Deploy, Brodie said, was designed out of the box to model applications and their environments, as well as the deployment process for automation.

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“Continuous integration and continuous testing is what we’ve been building for customers for many years,” he said. “The deployment app—we announced version 1.0 a few years ago—and this is the next-generation offering that takes a model-based approach to how you define your environment and processes.”

Brodie said ElectricFlow was designed to automate the Continuous Delivery process from the point where a developer checks in code until it is pushed out into production. So developers, testers and operations work in the same platform, which overcomes the great developer/operations divide and eases collaboration on builds, feedback and deployment.

Separately, Brodie said ElectricCloud has established an alliance to provide an out-of-the-box, integrated solution for continuous delivery. “Lots of folks are choosing best of breed, like Rally and Chef. We’re looking for an APM piece,” he said. ElectricCommander already has plug-ins to hundred of tools, he noted, so users can provision infrastructure from VMware or Amazon and configure it with Chef, for instance, resulting in users “orchestrating (it all) into an end-to-end Continuous Delivery pipeline.”