Rally, a leader in Agile software development management, has acquired Flowdock, a social collaboration hub for teams. The acquisition will add unified communication and collaboration to Rally’s Agile ALM platform to ensure teams perform at a high level by keeping them connected and making the status and progress of work transparent.
 
“Collaboration is fundamental to Agile software development. Flowdock represents a powerful way for teams to collaborate on projects directly from their usual workflow,” said Tim Miller, Rally’s CEO. “Flowdock introduces an innovative way for teams to chat so users can stay in context and in flow.”
 
In the October 2012 report, “The Forrester Wave: Application Life-Cycle Management, Q4 2012,” Forrester Research, Inc. says, “Many of the biggest ALM challenges, such as coordinating the work across geographically distributed teams, boil down to collaboration problems. Collaboration presents some extremely vexing puzzles for tools vendors, particularly given how idiosyncratically a specific set of people may collaborate with each other.”
 
With more than 35 integrations, Flowdock is an information aggregator that brings together activity from project management tools, version control systems, operations monitoring and customer feedback channels. Co-located and geographically distributed teams get an easily consumable flow of the information they care most about to stay up-to-date and react in real-time.  
 
“Rally’s products provide a great high-level overview of teamwork, but teams need to have a higher-noise communication medium,” said Otto Hilska, founder and CEO of Flowdock. “We’ve done lots of fine tuning based on direct feedback from software developers and are excited to integrate Flowdock’s social collaboration capabilities with Rally’s enterprise Agile ALM platform so teams can quickly discuss issues and collaborate on the most important work.”
 
The founders of Flowdock, Otto Hilska, Mikael Roos and Tuomas Silén, are experienced software developers and serial entrepreneurs who previously founded Nodeta and APIdock. Otto, Mikael, and Tuomas, along with the rest of the Flowdock team, join Rally’s first international R&D facility, based in Helsinki, Finland. Visit Rally’s Agile Blog to hear Otto and Rally’s VP of Products, Todd Olson, discuss the acquisition and why social collaboration is so important to teams.