CollabNet Goes Agile, Acquires Danube

Today, CollabNet announced that it has acquired Danube Technologies, a company that develops Scrum project management software and conducts Scrum certification training.  Founded in 2000, Danube was a small business with about 30 employees before the acquisition.  Despite their small size, Danube is one of the leading Scrum training organizations in the world and they are the authors of the popular ScrumWorks software for implementing Scrum.  CollabNet says they want to make ScrumWorks a part of their cloud-based developer toolset.

ScrumWorks and the commercial version, ScrumWorks Pro, will continue to be sold separately from Team Forge, Collabnet's core ALM platform.  In the short term, CollabNet will link the two platforms by enabling defect reports and commits tracked in TeamForge to update ScrumWorks.  The backend repositories of TeamForge and ScrumWorks will remain separate and they will continue to be sold separately.  CollabNet says a combined solution will be available in the second quarter of this year. 

ScrumWorks Pro's Enhanced Burndown Chart

CollabNet will focus on making ScrumWorks available on it's cloud-based infrastructure in order to allow distributed teams to use the product.  CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli believes that Scrum has become "the de facto method of managing software projects."  Although many companies, including Collabnet, have branded themselves as agile, they are usually not providers of purpose-built agile tools (like Rally Software and VersionOne).  Today, CollabNet can say without a doubt that they are a provider of true agile development tools (even though ScrumWorks is focused on one methodology).  

Before the Danube acquisition, CollabNet simply had an agile template on top of their TeamForge platform, which was not originally designed for agile processes.  CollabNet was best known instead for being one of the first open source tool vendors to become profitable.  The company is well known for being co-founded by Brian Behlendorf, the co-founder of Apache, and for creating the popular source control/config management tool, Subversion.  With the acquisition of Danube, CollabNet could become very successful by expanding into the agile realm.  Requirements management is the one area where the combined TeamForge/ScrumWorks portfolio is still lacking.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Danube CEO and co-founder Laszlo Szalvay says that the Danube team "couldn't be happier" with the terms.  Laszlo's brother and Danube co-founder Victor Szalvay is going to become the CTO of CollabNet's new Scrum Business unit.  You can see DZone's interview with Laszlo Svalvay at the Agile 2009 conference.