Telerik is out to prove that it can expand beyond components with the launch of two new divisions: one providing team productivity tools, and another to build automated testing tools.

The company will continue to sell its developer productivity products and Web content management solutions.

The ideas for the new divisions were born out the difficulties that Telerik faced in managing geographically distributed teams of developers that worked in different time zones, said CEO Svetozar Georgiev. “Keeping track of the software development process and having everyone involved efficiently was very difficult,” he said.

The new divisions announced their own products today. They include an agile project management solution called TeamPulse, and WebUI Test Studio 2010, a new edition of the company’s existing UI test suite that was last updated in December.

TeamPulse sits on top of Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). It is designed to improve the TFS’ user experience with a user-friendly Silverlight interface that is geared toward agile developers, Georgiev said.

Since it is built on Silverlight, TeamPulse is deployable via the Web. Remote offices specify the address of the central TFS installation, giving TeamPulse access to the project data that it needs to work with.

TeamPulse can be used as a planning sandbox, or be synchronized with TFS to coordinate planning with construction and measurement activities, said chief evangelist Todd Anglin. Tools are provided for requirements gathering, iteration planning, tracking and real-time analysis.

Telerik developed TeamPulse to enable its five regional offices, which operate in different time zones, to keep track of software development progress, Georgiev said. It found that traditional ALM solutions were priced too high, and that the latest Microsoft technologies such as Silverlight weren’t always supported, he added.

TeamPulse is available today as a beta, and will become generally available in July.

WebUI Test Studio 2010 allows TFS to maintain its test repositories. It will also enable developers to work more closely with QA professionals, Anglin said. It is shipping today.

WebUI Test Studio now includes a standalone edition that targets QA professionals, in addition to its Visual Studio plug-in. The standalone edition features a simplified interface, Anglin said.

Other changes include improvements to its recording process. Silverlight 4 support will be added after Microsoft releases it this month.