Collaboration Consolidation

By Andrew Binstock

June 1, 2007 —

The whole world is collaborating, it seems. Most any new product in software development today must have collaboration features built in. Eclipse, NetBeans and JBuilder all have greatly increased collaboration features in recent releases. And Visual Studio, of course, after a long stretch of incremental upgrades, suddenly gave birth to itself as whole new animal: the Team System (VSTS) that is built on a new collaboration platform into which discrete tools plug in. Products that don’t have collaboration features per se generally have hooks or an API that can attach to a collaborative package.

It’s easy to assume that this newfound group orientation that developers have suddenly begun to evince is a function of the Web and the ability to unite far-flung teams, but this view severely understates the greater group impulse.

Consider, for example, the recent practices you might find at even a small shop where all the programmers work under one roof: pair programming and code reviews. That’s the kind of funky, touchy-feely thing that 10 years ago would have induced the lone, star, cowboy programmer at the shop to storm off in a huff mumbling about how he wouldn’t have others comment on his code, much less whisper suggested names of variables as he hunched over vi.

These new practices, together with the factors at play in offshoring, make it seem inevitable that wide-ranging and integrated collaborative platforms will be part of our future. I predict even more changes are coming. One trend, for example, is the move toward greater transparency in coding and building. This transparency might lead your cubicle mate to point out, or even call out loudly, “Andrew, you broke the build again!”

The key word here is future. Despite the trend, the number of sites using comprehensive collaborative solutions for software development is actually quite small. The two largest independent vendors of such platforms—CollabNet and SourceForge—collectively have approximately 400 installations. (Per CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli, SourceForge is found at slightly more than half these installations, but typically at smaller sites, while CollabNet has the remainder, mostly in larger enterprises.) While the business is growing, I was surprised that, overall, it remains so small. A point of comparison is the ubiquity of content management systems (CMS) for Web sites: It’s hard today to find companies that don’t use a CMS to run to run their Web presence.

In late April, VA Linux, the owner of SourceForge, sold its collaboration platform, called SourceForge Enterprise Edition, to CollabNet. The two platforms will continue along separate tracks for the next year or so, each gaining features from the other. Thereafter, you have to presume, some kind of integration will occur. The sale was prompted by SourceForge’s desire to focus on its popular Web sites (SourceForge, Slashdot, ThinkGeek and others).

CollabNet, in contrast, is truly a tools company—its most famous product being Subversion, the widely used SCM product. So the sale makes sense. And since the trend points toward greater collaboration, CollabNet stands to make out well.

Its competitors are a motley crew. In pure Windows shops, of course, Microsoft’s VSTS is the dominant presence and not currently suitable for displacement. (Any installation of VSTS would represent a recent investment, so swapping it for a new platform would be a difficult sale.) The other major commercial competitor is IBM Rational. Big Blue has no direct competing product, but it does have several enterprise-scale point solutions that, with enough consultants, can be fashioned into a collaborative development platform.

However, neither of these vendors compares with the 800-pound gorilla, that nemesis of tool vendors and IT departments alike: the homegrown product. Says Portelli: “Homegrown is our biggest rival.” I have heard the same observation from vendors of SCM tools, defect trackers (especially!) and even rules engines.

I’ll avoid a long overdue rant on the folly of writing your own enterprise development tools—despite my conviction that this is a practice that is insufficiently condemned by pundits and analysts. Instead, let me point out that for collaboration platforms, you can see for yourself the benefits of either of the two leading solutions—at no cost. CollabNet makes completely free versions of both products available for small development teams: SourceForge Enterprise Edition (up to 15 users, Windows and Linux, at www.sf.net/powerbar/sfee) and CollabNet (up to 15 users, Linux only, at downloads.open.collab.net/cee15.html). Either will demonstrate the benefits of an integrated commercial collaborative platform.

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works. Read his blog at binstock.blogspot.com.

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