CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

15 May 2007

Implementation Investments

Rapid Subversion Adoption Validates Enterprise Readiness and Challenges Traditional Software Configuration Management Leaders

CollabNet announced the continued rapid adoption of Subversion among enterprise developers, the launch of an early adopter program for Subversion's upcoming Merge Tracking capabilities, as well as new investments in the Subversion development, support, training, and consulting programs for enterprise organizations. With its year-over-year growth of 265% ( http://www.collab.net/subversion ), Subversion continues to gain market share against traditional Software Configuration Management (SCM) leaders.

Version management is essential to software development and is considered the most critical component of any development environment. Subversion is an open source version control system that is rapidly becoming the tool of choice for distributed and multi-site development teams, replacing conventional SCM tools. Today, an estimated 1.75 million developers around the world rely on Subversion to version their code. Since the release of the first production-ready version only three years ago, Subversion's user population has doubled every few months -- a remarkable adoption pace for a community-developed software project.

With CollabNet providing professional support services to a growing community of business customers, Subversion is no longer used at only the project level. Today, companies around the globe are turning to Subversion backed by CollabNet's global and commercial support as the next generation version control system to standardize and optimize code repositories for distributed development projects and critical software assets.

"CollabNet is proud of Subversion's success and its unprecedented adoption among developers and in distributed development organizations," said Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet. "Seven years ago, when we started Subversion as a community-managed open source project, we provided the development community with the unique opportunity to create the best possible tool to get their work done. Today, Subversion is an unmitigated success: hundreds of thousands of software developers use it on a daily basis, the Subversion community continually improves the tool and extends its functionality, and we embed Subversion in CollabNet's commercial solutions for distributed software development. We are proud of our Subversion history and continue to be committed to the Subversion community."

The momentum of Subversion in the enterprise is fueled by the need to implement a proven alternative to conventional software configuration systems. Companies increasingly turn to CollabNet for its expertise in collaborative development practices, its ability to support enterprise organizations with professional Subversion support, consulting and migration services, and to deploy CollabNet-certified Subversion packages on enterprise platforms.

"At Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Inc., a joint venture between Fujitsu and Siemens, we are facing a multitude of challenges: development projects run on tight schedules and under tight budgetary constraints, our global parent companies require close collaboration with key business units in Europe and Asia and our global customer base have a diversity of needs," said Ron Sheen, CTO of Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Inc. "Supporting our global customer base was straining the capabilities of our source management systems. After careful evaluation, we migrated our entire development organization to Subversion. Subversion has been incredibly easy to deploy; best of all, we accomplished this with zero impact to our delivery schedules."

"As Subversion has met and surpassed the community's original goal of simply replacing CVS, we have extended our vision for Subversion accordingly," said Karl Fogel, president of the non-profit Subversion Corporation. "We are very excited about the growth we've seen in Subversion usage, and appreciate the role CollabNet has played in Subversion's success, from starting the project in 2000 to continuing to work closely with Subversion's worldwide developer community today."

As a part of CollabNet's ongoing commitment to the Subversion community and users in enterprise development organizations, CollabNet today also announced:

An early adopter program for the new Merge Tracking functionality that will be available in Subversion 1.5, due in late summer 2007. Merge Tracking, one of the most often requested features for Subversion, adds functionality that is typically available in enterprise SCM applications such as IBM® Rational ClearCase® and Perforce. CollabNet's early adopter program has been developed in collaboration with the Subversion community and customers who contribute to the project. SCM managers will be able to evaluate Subversion's enhanced capabilities, provide feedback, submit enhancement requests and communicate directly with the Subversion project developers. To sign up for the program, visit http://open.collab.net/mergetracking.html .

New investments in CollabNet's Subversion development team. Two recent key hires include Mark Phippard, the development lead of the Subclipse project which closely integrates Subversion to EclipseTM, and Paul Burba, a long-term member and contributor to the Subversion project.

The extension of its portfolio of professional Subversion support, training and consulting services for Subversion to better serve business customers and to promote enterprise adoption of Subversion.

About the Subversion Open Source Community

Subversion is an open source project that can be used to manage changes to any sort of digital information. In less than three years, Subversion has become the version control standard of choice for distributed development teams.

Subversion is available under an Apache/BSD-style license and runs on all modern flavors of UNIX, Win32, BeOS, OS/2, OS/400 and Mac OS X. To date, Subversion has been installed on more than 120.000 public Apache servers (source: SecuritySpace.com) and it is estimated that more than 1.75 million developers worldwide use Subversion to version their source code.

The home site of the Subversion project is Tigris.org ( http://www.tigris.org/ ), an open source community focused on building better tools for collaborative software development.

Visit CollabNet at http://www.collab.net/ or get more information about Subversion at http://www.collab.net/subversion .

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