Distributed software development solution provider CollabNet announced today that it has acquired Danube Technologies, maker of ScrumWorks Pro project management software, to boost its agile application life-cycle management offering. Terms of the deal between the privately held companies were not disclosed.
CollabNet has long been process-agnostic, but as agile methodologies—particularly Scrum—take off, CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli said “it was time to bite the bullet.” CollabNet, though, will continue to allow users to work in any process they wish, he pointed out.
In the last year, Portelli said he’s seen more developers and development teams using agile techniques, and that they are using the Internet to download free open tools for their projects. What this leaves managers, though, is “a bunch of teams with different tooling that can’t communicate” with each other, he said.
The distributed nature of CollabNet bridges that, and Portelli said there was a need to bring project managers together in the same way. And, with integrations that already exist in such tools and platforms as Eclipse, HP Quality Center and Microsoft Visual Studio, he said CollabNet is not only doing agile ALM, but heterogeneous agile ALM.
Victor Szalvay, CTO of Danube, said the company had been receiving requests to provide traceability down to the code level, but “that wasn’t our focus. We were PPM and couldn’t offer the breadth and depth” customers were looking for. “Rather than building something that’s compromised, by combining [with CollabNet], it’s the best of both worlds.”
Szalvay will work with the team integrating the companies’ product lines, which will begin with the CollabNet Connector Framework bringing ScrumWorks Pro functionality into CollabNet TeamForge. That initial integration should be completed in the second quarter of this year, Portelli said.
Beyond that, the ability to have a cross-program view into multiple projects is the first step toward gaining greater efficiencies in development and operations, he said.
