Agile project management software provider Rally Software has announced the acquisition of AgileZen, which makes a Kanban-based project management board. Terms of the deal between the privately held companies were not disclosed.
Rally founder and CTO Ryan Martens said Kanban, which literally means “sign board” in Japanese, adds value to both ends of agile: those that are just looking to get started with agile development practices, and those who have refined them to the point of doing “continuous flow” development. Rally built its own Kanban board mashup into its product last year, and Martens sees that “lean” concept working together with the Scrum agile process.
“Scrum’s first focus is on [project] cadence and synchronization that organizations can use to lock down their processes and scale up,” he said. “It’s also about review and retrospection” to see what to fix and improve. Martens added that with Kanban, “The focus is on getting value from limiting the bad side. You get different benefits first.”
He said Rally will integrate the AgileZen Kanban board into Rally’s software, but will keep the AgileZen product line alive as a low-cost, Kanban-focused project collaboration tool for organizations not doing software development, such as marketing agencies and law firms that need to project work over a long period while dealing with daily issues that crop up.
“The value stream is stretching out to customers who might not have a need for ALM but want things to run more smoothly,” Martens said. “They need something more lightweight.” — David Rubinstein
EARNINGS
Intel reported a US$2.4 billion profit for the first fiscal quarter 2010 ended March 31, a huge jump over the $629 million for the same period a year earlier. Revenue was $10.3 billion, an increase over the $7.15 billion reported for last year’s first quarter. The company cited strong sales in the PC Client group, its largest business unit, reporting a 43% increase over the same yearlong period to $7.67 billion. Intel is offering guidance for the current quarter of $10.2 billion in revenue with a margin of $400 million in either direction. Analysts had been expecting second-quarter revenue of $9.8 billion.
Adobe Systems reported revenue of US$858.7 million for its fiscal first quarter, a 9% increase over the $786.4 million reported in the same year-ago quarter. GAAP earnings per share were 24 cents on net income of $127.2 million for the quarter, down from income of $156.4 million in the year-ago period but a big improvement from the loss of $32 million posted in the fourth quarter of 2009. The launches of the updated Flash Player and framework, along with the Creative Suite, should bolster second-quarter figures, the company said in a statement.
