As GitHub expands its international operations to India, startups can take advantage of the opportunities it presents. With GitHub Enterprise now available for free through Microsoft for Startups, these companies can benefit from a slew of services to scale.

Not only will they receive $1,000 of monthly credit for up to two years of GitHub Enterprise Cloud, but they can also avail of other valuable features including Azure credits, Visual Studio Enterprise, and Office 365. Furthermore, they would also get sales and marketing support. 

Not just startups, even large businesses are embracing the benefits of GitHub Enterprise – be it to boost collaboration, get end-to-end security or automate their workflows. In fact, the San Francisco-based company claims that as many as 2.1 million organisations have subscribed to the service since its inception.

These companies are using GitHub Enterprise as a one-stop-shop for developer innovation – be it for building safer code faster, benefiting from actionable metrics like tracking KPIs and accelerating innovation with community-powered insights, or automating workflows.

Here’s a run-down on how some of the world’s leading companies are using GitHub Enterprise in their businesses:-

Ford

The auto industry has fundamentally changed over the last few decades. Today, each part is anchored around complex software systems, and that necessitated a change in the way the American automaker handled its software processes.

The company heavily leveraged new technology as it expanded the development of more complex features in its cars. It was around this time that it felt the need for one standardised toolset for employees working across different systems. A car has hundreds of sensors, each of which may not be connected; but in order to create more features, one needs to build on these sensors, and according to the company, that cannot happen without working in a coherent and collaborative fashion.

This collaborative ecosystem, driven through GitHub, allowed the company’s developers to work on new code as well as find solutions that may already have been developed. By being on the platform, Ford no longer needed permission to create a repository or offer a suggestion, removing bottlenecks across the organisation. 

Today, the company is using GitHub for slide decks, statistical analysis as well as IT support. The last one has been one of the more unique use cases. According to the company, they typically make comprehensive use of markdown in wikis to document how things are meant to work in the data centre, but with GitHub, they can simply drop an issue in the repository and get answers a lot faster. The platform also helps Ford find new talent.

Ford now has 9,000 employees using this platform around the world, including Germany, England, India, China, Australia, Brazil, and the US – and the number is only growing.

SAP

One of the largest providers of business software in the world today, the system it has built currently services 25 different industries. The company largely credits GitHub as the way for it to bridge the gap between open and closed source projects. And this has become critical as more lines of code make the transition from their servers to the public cloud. Today, a lot of its projects start as open-source code on GitHub, and the benefits are manifold.

Ranking at the top of the company’s software tools, it is not only used to share code, but also to spark innovation, improve productivity, and even as a hiring tool. According to the company, it is not just software, but an entire ecosystem of support that spurs best practises from an open-source community. This collaborative way of building software can add a lot of value to startups. Another feature that makes it attractive for them is that they can freely create as many repositories as they like and build on an idea. 

SAP now has more than 35,000 developers across 6,000 GitHub organisations, and together, they maintain at least 1,55,000 repositories between themselves. And not just developers, SAP employees who use GitHub range from data scientists to product owners to designers.

Decathlon

The world’s largest sporting goods retail brand no longer identifies itself as a product-only company. With digital transformation drastically changing the retail game, it has progressively begun to embrace open-source as it leverages the global engineering community to understand its customers better – a practice that has admittedly made it nimbler.

The company’s 1,000-member IT team uses software to manage inventory, point of sale (POS) and item pricing, and chose GitHub Enterprise as their platform to do the same. The team can access the 2,600 repositories in their organisation and this has been greatly helpful. Since all their repositories have been consolidated, it saves them the trouble of navigating through multiple repository locations. The team also uses Dependabot – a GitHub feature – to automatically check for out-of-date libraries and then generate pull requests to update them.

However, although the culture of the inner source allowed everyone to benefit from collaboration and reuse of code, this shift from on-premise to cloud-based and open-source initially presented security concerns. This outlook has changed with a single sign-on process and third-party applications.