News

CollabNet Launches ALM Platform CloudForge

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• May 2, 2012

CollabNet, a distributor of the Subversion open-source application lifecycle management (ALM) platform, is bringing its source version control (SVC) technology to the cloud.

The company announced the launch of CloudForge, a self-service iteration of its TeamForge ALM platform and source code repository that runs in public and private clouds. CollabNet's ALM technology is used by developers who practice Agile development.

Enterprises typically have used TeamForge on premises or in privately managed datacenters. But as IT organizations look to move more of their non-essential infrastructure off-premises, CollabNet sought to cloud-enable its platform. The effort began in earnest in 2010 with the acquisition of Codesion. At the time, CollabNet launched a multi-tenant version of TeamForge called TeamForge Project.

CloudForge will allow distributed development teams to manage the lifecycle of their code on public cloud services from Amazon Web Services, Joyent Google (App Engine) and Salesforce.com (Force.com). Through a partnership with VMware, CloudForge will also work with public and private clouds based on CloudFoundry.

CollabNet describes CloudForge as a development platform as a service, or dPaaS, because it's architected for development, deployment and scaling of applications. "We looked broadly across our 10,000 customers and started to recognize the trend of how public cloud customers are deploying to Amazon Web Services and leveraging our source code repositories on demand, and how our on premises customers are doing the same thing," said Guy Marion, VP and general manager for CollabNet's cloud services and formerly Codesion's CEO. CloudForge is built on the Ruby on Rails-based multi-tenant platform that runs Codesion, Marion said.

CloudForge will appeal to development teams because it provides self-service access to various programming tools and simplified deployment to public and private clouds, according to Marion. At the same time, it's designed to address enterprise concerns by offering role-based security, automated backups and support compliance requirements of running code in the cloud. CollabNet's TeamForge and Subversion Edge will also integrate with CloudForge.

Available first is Subversion Edge CloudBackup, which provides archiving, redundancy and migration services for CollabNet's on-prem offerings. Later this year, CollabNet will offer elastic server provisioning, reporting and collaboration services for hybrid cloud services.

The hybrid cloud platform will include a UI that supports collaboration among developers, an activity feed for developers that provides real time streaming, reporting for IT pros, the new AppCenter for hosting or connecting Agile tools from a provisioning platform called My Services to a number of third party tools such as Basecamp, Rally, JIRA and Pivotal.

CollabNet is also launching Marketplace, an online store where developers can purchase add-on tools and services from its partners such as Cornerstone, ALMWorks, BrainEngine, SOASTA, New Relic and Zendesk.