Collaboration is in our DNA: CollabNet

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

Forrester Research named Subversion The Best Option for Standalone Software Configuration Management, in May 2007, as part of their Forrester Wave Vendor Summary

“Put CollabNet on your shortlist of products to consider, especially if you are considering a hosted solution, have distributed teams, utilize a variety of in-house and external resources, and want a fairly “pluggable” backbone that will provide workflow coordination.” (Gartner)

“To get ALM from IBM today, you need to buy all the tools and then the services to tie them all together. That’s much more costly than turning on CollabNet tomorrow.” (Forrester)

CIOL: What was the web seminar all about?
TDDL:The ROI of Distributed Development: Software development is undergoing a dramatic shift - multi-site development, partner co-development, outsourcing, open source, and compliance mandates are placing new demands on development organisations. At the same time, IT executives and development managers are under increased pressure to deliver better products faster while reducing development costs.

This web seminar showcased how Applied Biosystems, Capgemini, and a Fortune 100 financial services company were each able to achieve hard ROI of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first year of adopting CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise Edition.

It demonstrated how real world customers are modeling their cost savings through reduced infrastructure costs, increased productivity, reduced downtime, and more efficient collaboration.

CIOL: Why did you choose India as a destination for this event?
TDDL: I was traveling to India to meet with our local office where CollabNet has a development, marketing, and sales team. We wanted to do a local event because we have heard from our customers around the globe that the ROI and cost cutting issue is a very relevant and timely topic. So we took the opportunity for our Indian customers to participate in a live Webinar event.

CIOL: Please explain your expansions/roadmap in India?
TDDL: CollabNet already has an office in Chennai, India that has approximately half of our full time employees. Our staff does development, technical support, marketing, and sales.  We see the Indian market as a significant growth opportunity for CollabNet hence the reason for our increased investment in the Indian market. 

CIOL: Why did the US defense forces choose CollabNet for 10,000 users?
TDDL: After a thorough review of competitive products, the US Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) chose to implement CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise and CollabNet CUBiT because of the flexibility and the open platform that ensures forward compatibility as software development methodologies advance.

Both products easily integrate with existing CollabNet installations throughout the Defense Department and are available as on-site and SaaS deployments, which are key to providing scalability while reducing costs.

CIOL: Going forward where do you see CollabNet by 2012? New forays if any?
TDDL: CollabNet continues to focus on making software development easier, faster, and more cost effective – that’s our mission. We will continue to invest in our products and work with the community to build product add ons to our commercial products – such as the CollabNet Desktop.

We see software development in the cloud as the next, natural step for collaborative software development teams. While cloud computing is interesting on its own (who doesn’t want all of Amazon’s computing resources available to them?), having tools for managing the cloud resources specifically for development tooling and workflow is key. Cloud management for development brings teams this level of control and visibility, necessary in the new landscape. CollabNet has added new features to our core CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise platform for cloud management for build and test services and is working with partners to bring this vision to the market.