News

CollabNet Acquires Danube

• By Michael Desmond
• February 26, 2010

Leading agile application lifecycle management (ALM) solutions and services provider CollabNet on Monday announced that it had acquired Danube, a provider of Scrum-focused agile project management solutions and services. The move will enable CollabNet to provide both technology and management focused solutions for agile dev shops, said Bill Portelli, chief executive officer at CollabNet. CollabNet

"From a tooling perspective, we have these very open set of APIs through a common connector framework to allow people to plug and play and exchange data. So now we are providing agile project management, or Scrum management, to allow teams to access this rich set of data no matter how it is approached," Portelli said.

CollabNet's TeamForge product is an integrated, cross-platform ALM platform that supports distributed development and multiple programming methodologies. TeamForge version 5.3, released last year, debuted specific support for agile methodologies, according to Forrester Research Senior Analyst Dave West. He said the Danube acquisition strengthens CollabNet where it was perhaps weakest: project and portfolio management (PPM).

"By adding Danube's focus on the management aspects to TeamForge's focus on collaborative engineering, CollabNet will be able to provide a very compelling ALM product," West said in an email interview. "This is consistent with the changes we are seeing the market place with traditional ALM vendors moving into the Agile PPM space by adding capabilities, and Agile PPM vendors adding more traditional ALM capabilities."

West singled out examples of competing products extending support, including Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 boosting support for Scrum, IBM Rational Team Concert improving Agile planning, and Hewlett-Packard offering its HP Quality Center Agile Accelerator. CollabNet will integrate Danube's ScrumWorks project management tool functionality to extend its reach in the market, said Portelli.

"The short answer is in Q2 you'll see an integration between ScrumWorks Pro and TeamForge. Basically that will be centered around passing the appropriate information back and forth," Portelli explained.

Portelli said work will start with common artifacts for the program management team and developers, such as epics, stories, tasks and other planning items. Integration will later extend to software artifacts like code links and build scripts, which will enable project manager to quickly drill down on topics of interest.

In addition to tooling, Danube brings a global staff of certified Scrum trainers into the fold. West said Danube boasts a strong service arm.

"This will be a great addition to CollabNet as they will be able to provide Agile transformation support to customers," said West. "Historically CollabNet has been not focused on this market, but increasingly the market is looking for both tool and process help in partnership."