BANGALORE, INDIA: Companies of all sizes have started adopting open source, collaboration dynamics to increase productivity, reduce costs, and innovate faster. This trend will continue to accelerate as companies look for more cost effective ways to develop software. In this backdrop, Tony De La Lama, vice president, WW marketing and corporate strategy, CollabNet, shares his vews with CIOL.

Excerpts:
CIOL: What is the significance of enterprise-wide collaboration for users?
Tony De La Lama: CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise is an integrated suite of Web-based SCM, issue tracking, project management, and collaboration tools that empowers teams to build great software. By centralising management of users, projects, processes, and assets, CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise dramatically reduces costs, increases productivity, and improves project visibility.

CIOL: How do you foresee collaborative software developments over the years?
TDDL: Collaboration is in our DNA: CollabNet was the founder of the Subversion open source project in 2000 and the most active developer communities use CollabNet – tigris.org, java.net, openoffice.org. Thousands of open source projects already run on CollabNet, used by millions of developers worldwide.

Moreover, companies of all sizes have adopted open source, collaboration dynamics to increase productivity, reduce costs, and innovate faster. CollabNet has hundreds of Enterprise customers including Deutsche Bank, US Department of Defense, Reuters, Philips Medical Systems, Capgemini, and Barclays Global Investors.

From our growth, we see this trend continuing to accelerate as companies look for more cost effective ways to develop software. CollabNet is the leader and well positioned to be the solution companies turn to adopt these collaborative best practices.

CIOL: How CollabNet can help software companies in bringing down the cost to market in current market scenario?
TDDL: By connecting remote teams and integrating disparate development tools, the CollabNet platform simplifies distributed development, reduces infrastructure costs by more than 50 percent, and eliminates silos between isolated teams to speed innovation by 20 percent and more.

CIOL: How companies in India should look at SAAS as an option?
TDDL: CollabNet offers two flexible delivery models for organisations of any size to facilitate fast deployment, with much lower upfront investment (no on-site software to configure and manage) and lower on-going management costs (no on-site servers to manage and maintain).

From a recent Gartner survey where they polled a number of enterprises across the world, they found that 90 per cent are planning to maintain or increase their investments in SaaS. Respondents cited cost-effectiveness, and ease and speed of deployment as some of the key reasons for the decision. "The majority of enterprises expect to increase their use of software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the coming months and years."

CIOL: Can you give me the market size of this industry and what is CollabNet rating? (Figures from market research firms)
TDDL: The software development market is estimated to be $14 billion world wide.
CollabNet is the corporate sponsor of Subversion. Subversion is the fastest growing open source application for software version control which has achieved installation on more than 3 million public servers.

This doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of installations behind the firewall, on corporate networks:  http://www.collab.net/community/subversion/articles/Subversion%20Growth.html