Open source collaboration tool from SoftPro

HYDERABAD- Soft Pro Technologies, a 100 percent subsidiary of SoftPro Systems Ltd, is gearing up for a June 2004 launch of SmartSource, a collaborative platform for increasing the productivity of development processes of an enterprise. "This would enable teams to collaborate from different geographic locations," said the company CEO Venkata Rao Mallineni.

Mallineni elaborated that SmartSource has been developed on a portal to evangelize the open source development through community contribution. The portal www.ossprojects.net has MCA and B. Tech students registered on it playing an active role in taking the projects further.

SoftPro is also developing a platform to automate the support processes of an enterprise. "SupportPro, currently in early stages of development, will enable support system teams to utilize various functions such as help desk, knowledge base creation as an integrated environment," added Mallineni.

SoftPro Technologies which commenced its operations in January 2004 focuses on developing products and platforms using open source tools and technologies in the areas of systems and network infrastructure, clustering solutions and embedded systems etc. The company is working on developing integrated network security platform. "It is likely to go for beta testing in a couple of months," informed Mallineni.

He added that the primary focus of the company is to advise enterprise clients on providing smooth migration path to open source platforms like JBoss, Apache, SAP DB, MySQL, Linux OS, Linux RTOs, etc. and adopting/ building appropriate migration tools and methodologies.

The company has been working on open source for the last 20 months and has taken a hybrid approach to growth by integrating open source into its platforms and frameworks. According to Mallineni, the company will be focusing on cluster solutions next.

SoftPro Systems is one of the nine companies in Hyderabad which have come together in a consortium to leverage on competencies and partake of the advantages of a mid-sized company while bidding for projects in the US and Europe.

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