CollabNet: Accelerating Application Development, Delivery, and Collaboration

Flint Brenton, CEO

DevOps is a phenomenon that is evolving from a cultural and professional movement into a mainstream operating model. According to a Gartner survey, DevOps toolsets, had an estimated $2.3 billion market share in 2015, and will see major growth as 25 percent of Global 2000 IT companies are adopting the technology in 2016. Set against that backdrop is CollabNet, which has a strong history in pioneering innovative open source solutions and today provides best-of-breed Versioning, ALM and DevOps products, and Agile consulting and training services to help organizations develop and deliver enterprise-scale software faster. “We enable companies to bring together distributed teams, increase productivity and speed time to market while reducing costs and regulation risks,” remarks Flint Brenton, CEO, CollabNet.

“There is a lot of interest in how CollabNet covers DevOps because we allow developers and teams to collaborate in a unified way so that development is aligned with business objectives and future innovation. There is growing demand for what we do because developers find other DevOps products to be either proprietary or limited in scope. They do not unify teams and make it easy to work together, as CollabNet does. On a technical level they are not as flexible; for example, they do not factor in the heterogeneous and global environments and methodologies that enterprises operate in today. On practical levels they do not cover governance and compliance the way CollabNet does. So CollabNet is ideal for enterprises that are taking DevOps to the next level and seeking to standardize on a flexible, easy-to-use DevOps solution that works across their enterprise,” says Brenton.

The firm's flagship product, TeamForge, is an open platform for enterprise application development, delivery and collaboration. It accelerates application development and delivery and maintains the highest standards of governance, compliance, and IP security. TeamForge includes a broad range of commercial and open source tools like JIRA, Jenkins, Nexus, and HP ALM and leverages development methodologies to help users improve their development practices. It also unifies centralized and distributed version control systems and connects dispersed and cross-functional teams with cloud-based collaboration tools.

Global search, discovery, collaboration, and reuse of code, community, and context from previous projects dramatically accelerate the delivery of new applications

“We use ChatOps extensively in our DevOps implementation so that developers can seamlessly communicate, create code in our open source development platform, and help build an efficient development environment,” explains Brenton. The developers can add document management functionality with review and approval workflows, automate versioning, and integrate with a wide variety of standard tools. “Global search, discovery, collaboration, and reuse of code, community, and context from previous projects dramatically accelerate the delivery of new applications,” says Brenton.

CollabNet has a loyal customer base— from technology and financial services to healthcare—including sterling brands such as HP, EMC2, Philips, Barclays, and Pfizer. “We serve over 6 million users at 10,000 customers in over 100 countries,” says Brenton. As an example, a company partner and large service provider in Europe was implementing CollabNet’s solutions for a diverse customer base. One of the largest automakers in Europe asked the service provider to enable easy upgrades to their auto software such as fuel efficiency tracker or GPS systems. The client wanted the upgrade completed quickly while the car was having an oil change or tires filled. CollabNet TeamForge was vital in delivering a platform that gave auto service stations the quickest way to deliver upgrades and implement other new software in the car. “The automaker saw a 50 percent increase in customer satisfaction,” remarks Brenton.

The company sees increasing demand for DevOps hosted solutions and will extend its solutions to cover the complete development life cycle including engineering tools, version control and other features of DevOps through cloud. “We are committed to innovation and collaboration that improves enterprise class software delivery,” concludes Brenton.