CollabNet plans to extend its toolkit to Indian firms

California-based CollabNet Inc plans to extend its toolkit to Indian companies through its Indian subsidiary CollabNet Software Private Limited. The company is in talks with eight companies in this regard.

CollabNet provides integrated, internet-based collaborative software development and business management solutions based on open source methods. CollabNet's Indian development centre that is based in Chennai, earlier known as Enlite Technologies, was acquired two years back.

Speaking to reporters here today, Brian Behlendorf, chief technology officer of CollabNet Inc, said, "Rather than just having a development centre the company sees India as a potential market for our products and we are in talks with eight companies."

Out of the total strength of 150 employees, the company has 60 developers based in Chennai, which it plans to increase to 90 in the next few months.

According to him global systems integrators based in India and those companies that do work for US companies here have shown interest in the toolkit offered by CollabNet. "The company sees potential in those companies using various products to collaborate teams, which are based in different locations," Behlendorf said.

Behlendorf said that though technology companies are growing quickly they are struggling to find how to have a relation with the rest of the world on technical basis and how to build a global team.

"Our toolkit facilitates this as our focus is on software engineering and specifically on enabling a world wide model and which can also be optimised for heterogeneous conditions which fits into today's outsourcing concept," he said.

Behlendorf said that the companies have to build repeatable models and reusable codes to go beyond time and materials and to be more than just body shop teams.

Speaking about the use of open source software by big IT companies, he said that more and more companies are realising the importance of open source software.

"Many of the companies that I know are thinking hard about the use of open source software and few of them are also experimenting internally," he said.

Behlendorf said that open source software was not losing steam to proprietary software, as many reports suggested.

"The Apache Software Foundation, which provides support for the Apache community of open-source software projects, has 1,300 registered members in the project. This shows that open source software is not losing steam," he said.