Web-based development collaboration systems have been in vogue for some time now, as is evidenced by the success of Atlassian and GitHub. CollabNet, on the other hand, has specialized in the more enterprise-focused Subversion side of development collaboration. Today, however, the company updated its development services platform, CloudForge, with new pricing models and capabilities aimed at competing with Atlassian and GitHub.
“CloudForge provides centralized access to a whole series of open-source development tools,” said Nick Bell, director of cloud services at CollabNet. But new to this version is the integration and combination of CloudForge and TeamForge, CollabNet’s enterprise team-collaboration software offering.
In the past, customers using CloudForge were butting up against the need to grow and scale to enterprise level, but were unable to do so due to CollabNet’s enterprise offering being kept as a separate product. Rather than continue to try and upsell/migrate customers who’d outgrown CloudForge, Bell said CollabNet decided to simply expand the capabilities of CloudForge.
Combined, CloudForge and TeamForge provide software development collaboration services layered with enterprise-level security and management tools. TeamForge, for example, provides “different levels of user security. Many of our customers have third-party contractors on the platform, so managing who has access to what is very important to them,” said Bell.
TeamForge also allows CloudForge users to maintain traceability to keep all those code contributions, issues and requirements tied directly to the important code required to fix or implement them.
But Bell said the most important feature for new users is the fact that the free version of CloudForge has no project or user restrictions, allowing users bring in as many project collaborators as they choose.
Beyond the free tier, there are three additional pricing tiers for CloudForge, which range from US$2 per user to a customizable amount for enterprise-level users. Enterprise features such as security, deeper customization and API-level access are unlocked as users move up the pay scale.
These new CloudForge offerings are specifically targeted at outshining competitive free and paid-for cloud-based development services, said Bell. “Definitely, people are drawn to GitHub for the source-code management of Git. They provide issue trackers and wikis around that, but at a certain point, there’s a limit to what you can do around that.
“Yet GitHub, from what we see out there, is trying to head into that enterprise market. We’re at a point where we can capitalize on our history in the enterprise. We want people to look at us not just as source-code management, but as a development platform where they can get started, and grow and scale to whatever they want to do.”
