In a move aimed at expanding the footprint of its distributed application lifecycle management platform TeamForge, CollabNet today said it will offer preconfigured professional services and new online resources.
CollabNet's Community in a Box consists of several new services, some free others fee-based that company officials said will make it easier to develop models for deploying TeamForge within an organization or extended enterprise.
For the consulting offering, the package will consist of services that will let enterprise development shops hire dedicated personnel starting at a fee of $15,000 per month. While the company already offers customized professional services, the latest offering consists of more focused deliverables, said Mike Bellissimo, CollabNet's vice president of worldwide services.
"In the past we had what I would call a statement of work-based service which was pretty open ended, where we basically assigned a resource," Belissimo said in an interview. "What is new is we packaged and documented specific deliverables that companies can expect to get as part of a service."
The offering is broken down into an advisor role and a manager role, where in either case the deliverables include templates CollabNet has used to help companies get started. The services also include training and support pages and a plan to set up to resources that will help customize TeamForge to support a community plan, he said.
The free one hour audit will assess the health of an organization's existing community and help assess key goals and determine deliverables.
CollabNet has also rolled out free guidelines and best practices in a wiki-style offering called Community Management Cookbook, which is available to those registered to openCollabNet. The cookbook is available here.
"I think there's going to be more and more of a need for these type of offerings because quite often you don’t have the resources internally that have this experience with ALM," said Keith Campbell, chief technology of Informatics, a provider of health care informatics services and a CollabNet customer. "Having a team that understands how to apply these technologies into different domains can be critical for success."
Indeed such services will appeal to many organizations that have limited resources to kick start such initiatives, said Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond. "Developers want to see a vibrant community and a product with the 'smell of success' before they invest precious resources learning a new technology," Hammond said in an e-mail.
It will also help mitigate some of the risk, he added. "Many IT shops are looking at the success of the open source community model (project like Eclipse, and Apache), and wondering why it works so much better than many of their own project infrastructures," he said. "Some of these companies are looking to emulate OSS with their own 'internal forges'. This will also appeal to those folks as well."