CollabNet looks to outrun incumbents

CollabNet on Monday introduced new versions of its hosted application development tools aimed at both open-source projects and corporate customers.

CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.5 adds better reporting tools, reusable templates, and a "wiki-like editor" to edit project home pages, said Brian Behlendorf, the company's chief technology officer.

The company is also offering support for the latest release of Subversion 1.4, an open-source source-code versioning tool.

With the two products CollabNet can now offer both high and low-end collaborative development services, Behlendorf said.

CollabNet is offering a hosted version of what incumbent tool vendors--IBM, Microsoft, Borland and others--are each pursuing: a suite of application lifecycle management tools.

Behlendorf said that the company's service, designed to host collaborative projects over the Internet, gives the company a head start.

"It's very difficult to take tools set designed for local area network and make work on wide are network," he said. "The difficulty of most collaborative tools has been they are very physical plant-centric."