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Open Source and Collaboration -- A Combo That Works: QA with Isabelle Dumont, Taki Katshiba & Arvind Khurana of Collabnet
Collabnet is a collaboration company that makes open source software a real collaborative effort and wonderful at that. The Collabnet platform supports globally distributed teams in a centralised, cost-effective manner, which can yield 20-30 per cent annual savings through reduced development infrastructure costs, increased productivity, improved project visibility and shared access to software assets. More popular for its Subversion enterprise software, Collabnet is also present in the Eclipse arena. On the sidelines of JAX India 2007, SDA caught up with Isabella Dumont, Senior Director for Product Marketing at Collabnet; Taki Katshiba, Vice President of Asia Pacific; and Arvind Khurana, Country Sales Manager at Collabnet India, to know more about its business.


Collabnet is among those companies that have pioneered Linux and other open source technologies. Can you tell us why did you go for open source technology while you were using both open source and proprietary software as recent as two years ago?

Collabnet: The key thing for us in using open source is to drive adoption of technology to develop high quality software. We strongly believe in the open source technology and its potential.

Tell us about your own involvement and role in the collaborative technologies and how does that help Collabnet?

Collabnet: Collaboration is a very interesting area and if you look at companies in Asia, they are all outsourcing and this helps them. Collaboration helps our customer here in India and elsewhere and we see a lot of synergy in that.

Sun, HP, Intel, Motorola, SK Telecom and Philips have all been using Collabnet technology for long? What has been and will be Collabnet’s focus in future?

Collabnet: We have very much thought of it. And for any software project, our focus has been to reduce the development cycle. So we will do that by extending our technology or working with our technology partners.

What are your comments on the Microsoft-Novell deal? How will that affect the open source world?

Collabnet: My thinking is the deals can happen at high level corporations and the open source movement is totally different. Developers and individual contributors taking control of the development of software and that is very different from the high level negotiations.


Fig. 1: (from left) Taki Katshiba -- Vice President of Asia Pacific, Arvind Khurana -- Country Sales Manager at Collabnet India, and Isabella Dumont -- Senior Director for Product Marketing at Collabnet



What has been your success rate in penetrating the enterprise market? Please give us figures also.

Collabnet: We are very pleased with what is happening. Subversion, which is really the core product we sponsor, I would say, is in use in nine out of the ten companies we talk. One again it is the best tool one can use. It is very non-inclusive and many of the developers are downloading it to replace what they are not adopted to do. This where Collabnet is getting into and training and supporting developers and the adoption of Collabnet grows organically. I think with each region, we have been very successful and are targeting big companies in Japan, China, Korea and China. We have had some meeting with customers and believe we will have fairly quick turnaround in the industry this year.

Are there any new projects that you are planning to propose at JAX India 2007 and what are you looking to do at the event? Are there any other topics of importance that you want to speak on at the event?

Collabnet: Yes, we have announced the availability of Eclipse support. Developers can directly get access to Eclipse and can work on it and track issues and problems related to the Eclipse environment. We are really excited about it.

What are the new trends you see in the usage of open source software in the enterprise market and why is there a growing interest from industries in open source?

Collabnet: We are in the midst of the Subversion project and our experience with customers is that we cannot start directly at solutions. But adopting open source software also starts with trying to use smarter software developed by a smarter group of people and they try to solve the problem rather than try to develop something that can be solved. We believe in a totally new philosophy. In the last three to four years, companies have really adopted a hybrid open source model. Collabnet provides enterprise class technical support and training and that fits enterprises very well.


Fig. 2: Collabnet at JAX India 2007



Open Source versus proprietary software in the enterprise? What are major challenges for open source to get more industries to adopt it?

Collabnet: I think the biggest hindrance is that the management would see like ‘this is Open Source” and have certain problems. We have Subversion and people have a lot of faith in it. My take is that customers want a good product and they can look at anything. They can get some quality in open source products and some in proprietary products. That can be a mix and to some that can be exciting. It forces everyone to be more creative and forces innovation.

Collabnet recently bought a tool from Sourceforge. Can we see more such purchases in the future?

Collabnet: To go back, we certainly want the coverage of the development lifecycle and we will do it either developing by our own or work with collaborators or even by potential acquisition.

The company also plans to find more customers for its flagship product CollabNet Enterprise Edition, which allows physically distributed teams to work simultaneously on software development projects. Can you tell us on how this is working out?

Collabnet: We are putting in place our enterprise edition and now one can now download the Collabnet enterprise edition for free and get a 15-user trial for free. This puts the trial version in the hands of lot more enterprises and lot more people and we are seeing direct results. Get access to technology first and if they they like it then they buy it.
 


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