CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
12 March 2007
Implementation Investments
Philips Medical Systems Leverages Open Source Principles of the CollabNet® Solution for Its Development Environment
CollabNet announced that CollabNet® Enterprise Edition is the development solution at Philips. CollabNet is used by Philips Medical Systems to promote collaboration between geographically dispersed development teams, improve cross-team use of software assets, improve overall development efficiency, and decrease time to market. CollabNet's open approach to software development enables Philips Medical Systems to better leverage the collective power of its software developers organized in more than 25 software engineering groups in more than 10 business lines on three continents.
Philips Medical Systems is a division of Royal Philips Electronics with 2005 sales of $8 billion. The division provides imaging equipment in X-ray, CT, MR, Ultrasound and nuclear medicine imaging, used to create images for radiologists and cardiologists. Its products are built around the Medical Imaging Platform (MIP) program, which serves as the technical base.
"As a multi-national organization, we manage globally distributed development resources for the Medical Imaging Platform program, the base of our products. Resources dispersed across three continents, in many teams, present a unique challenge," says Jan Broekhuizen, Program Manager, Medical Imaging Platform at Philips Medical Systems. "Working with CollabNet's development environment helps us accelerate time-to-market for products, effectively manage distributed development resources, and substantially improve the quality of the software components being developed."
Philips Medical Systems had previously relied on conventional development platforms and tools that were not designed for use in heavily distributed teams and geographically dispersed sites. As an example, components delivered by one team did not provide the functionality that the other teams need. Presenting an alternative, CollabNet brings openness and flexibility that allow developers to collaborate in a highly distributed fashion and leverage existing tools and processes.
Selecting CollabNet as the basis for its new collaborative software development infrastructure, Philips Medical Systems launched an initiative to introduce open source principles into its internal software development efforts. The open approach relies on product teams having full read-only access to the platform's development information, such as source code and team communication. Increased transparency enables product teams to adapt to another team's approach and to leverage its software assets, while requiring a well-defined framework of distributed ownership and control over software assets.
Adopting open source principles for the development of Medical Imaging Platform significantly altered the requirements for the development environment because it was necessary to allow easy yet secure and gated access to development information across the wide area network. Philips Medical Systems rolled-out CollabNet Enterprise Edition after a thorough review of the level of security and the managed services. The division also uses SubversionT, an open-source version control system sponsored by CollabNet.
"Philips Medical Systems is proof that open source best practices and frictionless collaboration work at the corporate level. They have demonstrated how an open and collaborative approach can transform software development into a more agile business," said Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet. "More and more enterprises are realizing that there is untapped potential within their own teams that can turn into competitive advantage. We're excited about the success our customers achieve as a result of CollabNet's innovative development environment."
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