CollabNet is getting back to its roots, with a new strategy centered on development in the cloud. The company today announced CloudForge, what it’s calling the first enterprise-grade hybrid cloud development Platform-as-a-Service to come to market.

A “perfect storm” of software development trends has led CollabNet to this strategic shift, according to CEO Bill Portelli. First is the adoption of agile development practices and their merger with other existing practices within an organization. Second is the extension of agile into the operations side, along with the emergence of “DevOps.” Finally, Portelli cited research that shows that by the end of 2014, half of all new applications will be deployed into the cloud, creating that hybrid cloud scenario. Thus was born (actually rebranded) CloudForge, which Portelli described as “Codesion with a year’s worth of extensions.”

“In the mid-2000s, we went onsite, and now we’re going to commit back to hosting,” he said. “We already have an enterprise footprint, so our cloud hosting scales from instant-on workgroups to tens of thousands of developers.”

Guy Marion, vice president for CollabNet Cloud Services, called CloudForge a “logical continuation of a long-term plan, which is how to offer an enterprise-grade approach across public and private” development environments.

A key part of CloudForge is App Center, which is where developers can tie into tools to increase developer productivity. Services such as CVS, Git and Subversion for SCM, and Bugzilla, DAV and Trac for defects can be provisioned in the “My Services” app zone, according to the company.

“We need to extend and leverage services, but want to take a solution-type approach to offer services that integrate into the development life cycle,” Marion said. Currently, test services from SOASTA, project management services from ALM Works, the agile process tools ScrumWorks Pro and VersionOne, and help-desk service Zendesk are integrated into CloudForge, as is the CloudBees PaaS. “This enables cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-premise development,” he said.

CloudForge, Portelli said, adds value to other cloud platforms such as Amazon, Joyent and VMware Cloud Foundry.

“We have APIs that make it externally callable, such as to fire off build processes, and that conform with role-based access controls,” Marion added. API integrations with CollabNet’s Subversion Edge SCM tool and its TeamForge distributed ALM platform give organizations the hybrid cloud capability.

So, Portelli explained, an organization can have a private TeamForge cloud, and can share resources and assets with the CollabNet-hosted CloudForge PaaS. For TeamForge, Subversion Edge Cloud Backup is available today, and an update of TeamForge is due out in the second half of this year.

CloudForge has a newly designed interface to promote collaboration in development, a developer feed that streams development activities into a searchable dashboard, and a reporting center that gives development managers and IT administrators visibility into project progress and system logs.

Along with CloudForge, CollabNet is re-launching with a new logo and a new tagline, “Powering Enterprise Cloud Development.”