"This new cloud offering gives people a way to get started without having to make a big capital investment. It puts a wading pool in place so people can get started without being heavily committed."

Pizzutillo admits as much. "RPA will make it easier for us to get started with customers," he says. "They have a notional, subjective belief in where their risks lie or where the bad apples may be, so we're able to, in a week's time, evaluate all their systems and build a smart, risks-based approach to how to apply software analysis and measurement to the handful of apps that are driving the risk, driving the maintenance costs in their organization."

In use, Cast's code analyzers -- which have business rules built in -- are sent to crawl through the customer's source code counting violations against the rule set, looking for things that should be happening that aren't and vice versa. The results are sent back to the cloud where they are aggregated into different dimensions. The client's code never leaves their facilities.

Because it is cloud-based, the tool makes it easier to analyze programs that are either scattered across locations or even hosted by third parties.

When do companies typically realize it is time for ? Pizzutillo says there are a handful of common scenarios, one being that result in a mishmash of IT systems, some of them redundant, that introduce new risks that are hard to ascertain.