Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Collaborative software ventures merge

April 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Collaborative software ventures merge

TAGS: Application Development

CollabNet has purchased SourceForge Enterprise Edition from VA Software, a move that CollabNet said places the two leading collaborative software development platforms under the one roof.

The acquisition, announced late on Tuesday, also enables CollabNet to take market share from the IBM Rational legacy development platform, CollabNet said.

"This transaction makes us stronger and bigger from a team perspective and a technology perspective," said Bill Portelli, CollabNet CEO.

With distributed development opportunities opening up, CollabNet wants to expand and believes it offers a more scalable, Web-based solution than the IBM Rational platform, Portelli said. CollabNet will support both the CollabNet and SourceForge product lines going forward but plans to merge the lines in 2009.

Under terms of the purchase agreement, CollabNet has acquired the SourceForge Enterprise Edition business from VA Software in consideration for an equity ownership stake in CollabNet and an undisclosed amount of cash.

CollabNet provides a collaborative platform for globally distributed software development. Project members can work as a team regardless of location. The company also is a primary sponsor of the Subversion open source version control system.

SourceForge also is a collaborative software development platform. By acquiring SourceForge customers, CollabNet triples its installed base, said Portelli.

While CollabNet offers products mostly on a hosted, SaaS basis, SourceForge has been predominantly used behind the firewall, Portelli said.

SourceForge customers get access to CollabNet technologies while CollabNet customers can access SourceForge capabilities such as clustering and software configuration management.

Collabnet will integrate some VA Software employees into the CollabNet organization.

"SourceForge Enterprise Edition customers and VA Software employees will substantially benefit from this combination of the two leading collaborative development teams and solutions," said Ali Jenab, CEO of VA Software, in a statement released by CollabNet an VA Software. "With our equity ownership in CollabNet we demonstrate our continued belief that demand for quality collaborative software development solutions continues to grow."

The VA management team now will focus on growing core online media assets such as SourceForge.net, Slashdot.org and Linux.com, Jenab said.

Posted by Paul Krill on April 24, 2007 05:01 PM

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