The reaction to CollabNet's acquisition of Danube in the press last week was extremely favorable. The market and our customers understand our vision and the rationale for this exciting merger. It’s great to see.  Last week, an Agile industry press expert asked me, “How does [CollabNet’s] merger of ALM and Agile leaders compare to the recent marketecture announcement of Company X, Y, and Z”?  These were his words, not mine.  (For obvious reasons, I have removed the references to the other companies this expert mentioned to me.)  

In my mind, this raised an age old question that has lived on forever in the tools and applications industry-- Is it better to deploy an integrated platform suite or a combination of loose tool integrations that may be optimized for specific use cases?  Clearly, there are pros and cons to both positions.  But from my experience, the architecture that consistently wins in the industry is a “just broad enough platform with an open set of APIs to allow the integration of best-of-breed point tools used by the multiple stakeholders to collaborate in that platform”.  For modern examples, look no further than FaceBook and Salesforce.com.

So what was my response to the analyst’s question?

 

In summary, CollabNet’s acquisition of Danube brings together, from a single vendor, (1) World-class Agile Scrum management and expertise proven to scale from the workgroup to the enterprise, and (2) a rich application lifecycle management solution built on a cloud-based collaborative architecture already used to power some of the largest and most respected developer communities in private industry and government.  This synergy is impossible for any loose combination of tools and architectures supplied via companies partnering with each other. The CollabNet/Danube offering has three clear advantages over loosely integrated entrants in the market:

1.       Strength of ALM Tool Integration –TeamForge is by far the industry’s most integrated end-to-end ALM platform for enabling collaboration. The platform encompasses all of the stakeholders of the software lifecycle from “requirements through release” for a variety of processes and technology implementation choices.  It is architected as a uniquely integrated platform enabling security, process modeling and tool interaction, which is just not possible with a loosely connected set of multi-vendor tools.  In addition, this includes not just ALM software development capabilities, but also a rich collaboration platform and community architecture that uniquely allows companies to define their ALM methods(s) and subsequently scale them from the workgroup to the enterprise.  And of course, TeamForge is a 100% cloud enabled architecture containing a rich set of APIs to connect to a user’s favorite point tools anywhere on the planet.  It is for this combination of reasons that our customers claim 10-50% design productivity at 1/5 the cost of the implementation of these multi-vendor-supplied collections of tools.

 

2.       Single Vendor Solution for Agile Management and Agile ALM –CollabNet alone provides the security and commitment as a single vendor for Agile project and program management as well as distributed ALM in the Cloud.  CollabNet intends to offer the ScrumWorks tools in both a stand alone mode, as well as an increasingly integrated extension to TeamForge.  We are already showing early integrations to the market.  If you’d like to see it, please let me know.

 

3.       Thought Leadership – For the past 10 years, CollabNet and Danube have both established thought leadership in the practical application the entire range of software methods – from collaborative SCM to distributed ALM to Scrum.  As examples:

• CollabNet founded and continues to drive Subversion, the largest and most successful open source version control system used in the enterprise (by 15-20x over the next largest open source versioning tool).  We also pioneered the cloud based software collaboration methods that were critical in forming the largest internal and external developer communities in the world. 

• Danube has the largest number of on-staff Certified Scrum Trainers in the World.  Via ScrumCORE, Danube has trained more Scrum Masters than any other organization and they continue to be highly visible and prolific in publishing materials on Scrum best practices.

The above is a strong position for me to take.  But our clients proven results are impressive, and they back my statements up.  It is uniquely this marriage of Scrum management and CollabNet’s globally distributed Agile ALM development platform that enables reductions in release cycles by as much as 75%, as demonstrated by this public article published by DST.   Development gains resulting from the use of a unified development platform are almost impossible to achieve using the alternative method -- a loose combination of easily available tools and architectures of home grown, open source, and vendor-supplied point tools.  Resulting incompatible databases and data formats, inconsistent processes and tool configurations, and overall support costs render the move to a unified environment to gain this organizational efficiency very difficult, at best.  Development teams and CIOs increasingly understand this differentiation, which is helping to drive CollabNet’s acceleration into the market. 

 

It’s an exciting time for software development.

Great news for the software development community! Today CollabNet announced our acquisition of Danube, the leader in Agile/Scrum management software tools, consulting, and training. Their ScrumWorks solutions have defined the standard for enterprise Agile/Scrum project and program management.

For the past 10 years, CollabNet and Danube have both proven themselves to be thought leaders in the practical application of the entire range of software methods – from collaborative SCM to distributed ALM to Scrum.  CollabNet founded and continues to drive Subversion, the largest and most successful open source version control system used in the enterprise. We also provide the tools and the software collaboration methodology services that power the largest internal and external developer communities.  In addition, Danube has the largest number of on-staff Certified Scrum Trainers in the world.  Via ScrumCORE, Danube has trained more Scrum Masters than any other organization (6,500) and they continue to be highly visible and prolific in publishing Scrum best practices. 

Now, this acquisition defines another major step for the market, and is recognized as such by industry analysts including Forrester,

“With this acquisition, CollabNet has taken a significant step in merging the disciplines of Agile project and portfolio management with  ALM.”

CollabNet customers will now have access to ScrumWorks, the leading Scrum project management tool, and an impressive team of certified Scrum trainers.  Meanwhile, Danube customers can now enhance their Scrum processes using CollabNet’s distributed ALM tools and knowledge.

CollabNet will continue to support heterogeneous development environments and allow you to work with your development technologies and methods of choice, whether waterfall, iterative, or Agile. At the same time, we’ll now be able to provide additional expertise around Scrum, the most popular framework for managing product development commonly used with agile software development.  The bottom line is that CollabNet will allow you to bring best-in-class scrum project/program management tools and processes into your organization, but at a pace that makes sense for the individual business needs of each project.

CollabNet is thrilled to welcome Laszlo and Victor Szalvay, cofounders of Danube, and their skilled team to the CollabNet family.  We plan to invest deeply in the ScrumWorks products and ScrumCORE services as Agile and Scrum are such significant components of the future of software development.  ScrumWorks and TeamForge will continue to be supported as separate products, but will also be available as a bundle.  Increasingly, we will deepen the integration of the two product lines, with the first release available to the market in the Q2 timeframe.  

We are extremely excited that CollabNet’s acquisition of Danube brings together, from a single vendor, (1) World-class Agile Scrum management and expertise proven to scale from the workgroup to the enterprise, and (2) Robust application lifecycle management built on a collaborative architecture already used to power some of the largest and most respected developer communities in private industry and government.  This synergy is impossible for any other loose combination of tools and architectures supplied via companies partnering with each other.

If you’d like more information on our products, this acquisition, and our plans for integration, please join us for a webinar on March 16, 2010:  http://www.collab.net/webinar/56/index.html

I hope our enthusiasm and optimism about the future of Agile ALM in the Cloud energizes and inspires you. As CollabNet leads the way in this space, we value your feedback and input in order to improve our products and help you succeed. I invite you to share your thoughts, concerns, and questions.

By Bill Portelli, CollabNet CEO & President

I am proud to be sitting here in Frankfurt making my way to Davos, Switzerland, where I will accept a Technology Pioneer Award. While there, I will also participate in a number of working sessions and breakout groups along with hundreds of technical, business, and social leaders from around the globe.  Although I will have the pleasure of accepting this award and participating in these sessions, I accept this on behalf of the hard work, passion, and vision of the current and past employees of CollabNet who have made globally distributed software development a reality. The community of World Economic Forum (WEF) Technical Pioneers was established by the WEF in 2000 in recognition of the importance of small companies that create impact through technical innovation of entire industries.  Since 2000, a rigorous annual selection process by the WEF in cooperation with a host of strategic partners identifies hundreds of companies worldwide, and eventually selects about two dozen companies each year. 

When thinking about why CollabNet won this award, a couple of things struck me.  First, it takes a certain kind of company to win.  Klaus Schwab, founder and still the driving force behind the WEF, founded it in 1971, based on the stakeholder theory, which states that the management of an enterprise has to serve all stakeholders.  In a 2008 London Times opinion piece, he wrote:  “ . . . the management has to lead the enterprise as the trustee of all stakeholders . . . in order to secure the long term prosperity of the company”.  By “stakeholder”, Schwab means all constituencies – both internal and external.  I’d like to believe that CollabNet management has operated in an open manner with this long-term view of serving our stakeholders since we founded the company in 1999 - both internally among our employees, as well as externally with our clients and business partners.   And of course, we need to look no further than CollabNet’s founding of Subversion and continued corporate sponsorship and leadership of it over the last 10 years to see that this multi-stakeholder long term view of the world is a core value of our company.  Perhaps it’s the open source gene coming through….

The second aspect that struck me even more was that the companies honored as Pioneers are recognized for creating “impact through technical innovation of entire industries.”  CollabNet, and our nearly 1,000 customers, have blazed the path for industry to define and adopt industry-changing software development paradigms -- from fractured and decentralized to collaborative and distributed.  We have done this across every industry, and often with award-winning results, such as the recent recognition by the US government for DISA’s CollabNet-based implementation of forge.mil.  Certainly, great technology is critical to winning such an award. Even more important is the ability to have the long-term vision and perseverance to identify an industry opportunity, and to work within that industry to bring to bear that technology for transformative gains for all that participate in that industry.  That’s exactly what CollabNet, DISA, and other companies have done in the past year - but more about that in a blog to come.

About the Author

Bill Portelli is CollabNet's CEO. Read his full bio here.

(Posted by Dana Nourie)

A recent Forrester research noted that 40% of the developers in Europe use Subversion.  At CollabNet, we have been pegging worldwide Subversion usage somewhere between 4-5M, so it was interesting to get an external survey to validate our own projections.  I compared this information against other data I gathered from a job site called Indeed.com.  They have a nice feature that allows you to look at trends in the use of words in job postings over the last 4 years, and compare multiple queries at once.  Please take a look at:

that compares the job postings for software developers with specific SCM skills (I searched on Subversion, ClearCase, Git, Perforce, StarTeam).  Basically, Subversion has jumped to the number 1 most submitted SCM job skill listed by companies posting openings at job sites as of the beginning of 2009.  Score another one for open source, and CollabNet’s continued sponsorship of Subversion. 

 

Back in 2000, when Brian Behlendorf and I first discussed sponsoring and open sourcing Subversion on Tigris (http://subversion.tigris.org/)  as a "replacement for CVS", we also had the longer term, and more quiet goal, of ultimately displacing ClearCase as the most popular SCM tool on the planet.  Of course, we knew this would be a long road in which we’d have to i) build a vibrant community of the best developers on the planet – both ours and those outside of CollabNet, and  ii)  listen well to the needs of the market and our enterprise customers to build a enterprise class and high quality SCM tool.   As ClearCase is licensed through traditional proprietary mechanisms, it's hard to measure whether we achieved this goal by looking at traditional business terms such as revenue, and bookings.  As a result, CollabNet has relied on other means, such as the aforementioned Forrester report to validate the industry usage of Subversion, and to validate the nearly 9 years of energy and passion by CollabNet and other talented open source developers.

 

So, I found the above chart from Indeed.com particularly interesting – as the validation of Subversions’ usage is not just by CollabNet, and not just by independent analysts like Forrester.  Instead, this validation of CollabNet’s original goal of displacing ClearCase as the most used SCM tool is by the technical and program management hiring managers that are looking for the best engineers with specific skills and tool set capabilities – and hiring managers are choosing Subversion over ClearCase……  Interesting….