Bill Portelli, CollabNet CEO and co-founder
Application lifecycle management (ALM) player CollabNet has bought Codesion, the firm that enabled Collabnet’s flagship open source Subversion version control system to be quickly deployed into cloud environments.
CollabNet was founded in July 1999 by Tim O’Reilly and Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache project. Bill Portelli joined CollabNet as its founding CEO in August, 1999, and still holds that position.
Portelli told CBR that Codesion was a natural fit, because while his firm had been looking or opportunities to take Subversion and its other ALM tools to the cloud and smaller workgroups, Codesion had been looking for ways of scaling its mostly workgroup users in the cloud to larger enterprises.
"We were moving downstream [to target workgroups instead of just enterprises] and Codesion was looking for better scalability and enterprise credentials," Portelli said. "We can take their core provisioning services and now provision our enterprise tools too."
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Millions of users at around 6,000 organisations, including Applied Biosystems, Capgemini, Deutsche Bank, Thomson Reuters, and the U.S. Department of Defense are said to use CollabNet’s technologies, while Codesion claims its Subversion hosting platform serves more than 3,400 customers and 70,000 users in 90 countries.
Codesion CEO Guy Marion told us the acquisition was, "An absolute no-brainer." A view shared by Ovum’s analyst Tony Baer, who told CBR that, "Codesion had become Subversion’s largest SaaS provider. [A] good fit for CollabNet."
Codesion was formerly called CVSdude, which, I suggested to its CEO, suggested a certain kind of culture in the organisation. How would that fit in a much larger organisation? "We’ve definitely got a bit of the CVSdude culture still," said Marion. "We’re a pretty tight bunch. We were at first pretty concerned about joining CollabNet but having seen their open source credentials and open source roots, our team is really excited. There are already a lot of links and we all have mutual respect."
Codesion has around 13 staff compared to CollabNet’s 275.
Today, Codesion enables the fast deployment of CollabNet Subversion and other technologies into the cloud with "one click". It currently supports Amazon, Joyent and Google clouds. Asked whether there are plans to add support for other cloud partners, CollabNet and Codesion’s CEOs said that they will consider additional cloud platform support based on customer demand, with Microsoft Azure being the next most likely candidate.
One of CollabNet’s strengths is its integration with other application development methodologies (especially Scrum and agile methods) and tools, including Eclipse, Visual Studio, HP Quality Center, Office and IBM Rational ClearCase.
Both CollabNet and Codesion’s CEOs told us they are not yet seeing any dismay amongst customers about Java’s new shepherd: Oracle. "I understand why you ask the question, but we’re not seeing anything like that yet," said Portelli. Codesion’s CEO said around half its customers code in Java, the rest using a variety of languages and tools like C#, .Net and PHP.
