Notably:

- Enterprise is delivered in an OVF, which means it's a fully contained VM. This simplifies deployments astronomically from the previous FI architecture.

- We've spent a lot of time on the runtime and packaging of Enterprise in relation to how it runs the code. It's now much faster.

- We've changed how we merge the two codebases (.com and FI/Enterprise). Effectively, they are the same now. This means new features that come to .com will come to Enterprise quickly/immediately. Previously we had to do hard, manual merges which meant new features got to FI very late (3, 6, 8 months later).

I'm a huge fan of apps released as VM images. I've seen this used extensively in testing and development, but not for production applications. Do you know of other companies who follow the same "our default install is an OVF" strategy?

I first heard the idea from Jeff Atwood in 2006 [1], neat to see the idea taking root with a high-profile product.

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/01/our-virtual-machine...

Squiz switched to distributing a free VM for the trial and production versions of their CMS: http://squiz.com.au/products/squiz-cms

(Previous versions were a tarball of PHP code and a lot of brittle install scripts.)

OpenVPN Technologies distributes a virtual appliance for their Access Server product, in addition to packages for the various distros.

Thanks for jumping in! Are there screenshots of this customer dashboard available anywhere?

GitHub Enterprise is the latest release of our on-premise product with a re-engineered back end and our new customer dashboard.

The OVF format is a large change.