CollabNet Takes Collaborative Approach

Trying to live up to the meaning of its name, CollabNet later this month will unveil a new partner program that takes a collaborative approach to working with a wide range of business partners reselling open-source software as services (SaaS) and other on-demand applications.

The company hopes its CollabNet Global Business Partner Program will encourage the channel to work with it to more fully embrace the distributed development methodologies needed to effectively compete in this emerging market.

"If we are to succeed in this new era, we will need a channel program that helps expand the opportunities for partners. We think we have the products that can deliver other products and services right out of our data center," says Chris Clabaugh, vice president of business development for CollabNet.

Some industry observers believe the new program, in part, is a response to Microsoft's recent announcements that it intends to deliver versions of its operating systems and core applications as services.

"With Microsoft and other software developers signaling a 'sea change' to Internet-based software and services, distributed development methodologies for software as a service, Service Oriented Architectures and global-development projects are becoming critical to facilitating and accelerating this shift," says Laurie McCabe, vice president of SMB Insights and Business Solutions of AMI-Partners.

McCabe believes the announcement of the new program is well-timed given that partners and their users are now seriously evaluating the pros and cons of Web-based software and how to shape it for their specific businesses.

"Open source is a great thing, but it suffers from its own 'openness.' There is no central ability for someone to deliver best practices to smaller companies. But by pulling together all the resources CollabNet has in this program, we can offer people a great way to extend their businesses and make more money," Clabaugh says.

CollabNet's program focuses on four major categories of partners: resellers who leverage their skills around a specific software or service; community partners including BEA, Sun and Oracle who have their own respective communities of partners; technology partners with products that are complementary to CollabNet and can be deeply integrated; and services partners.

The products in CollabNet's lineup that partners can work with include the CollabNet Enterprise Edition, a collaborative development environment that allows programmers to hook into a wide range of development environments, The CollabNet Community Edition, and the CollabNet Team Edition, a scaled-down version of the Enterprise Edition aimed at teams of five to 50 developers to get their projects up and running.

"The program is an extend-and-embrace strategy for the partner prospects we are looking at. There is no one way to bring channel partners on board and work with them in a generic way. We are trying to be more targeted in our approach and how we go to market," says Dan Dufault, director of channel sales and market development for CollabNet.

CollabNet's vehicle for working with partners is its On-Demand Collaborative Advantage, which is designed to be a channel-driven business model. The business model helps partners with lead generation, needs assessment, order taking and integration services.

All of the program's offerings can be tailored specifically to whatever a partner's long-term business goals are. Initial offerings include demand generation, sales acceleration, joint marketing, and support and training.

In a related development, CollabNet announced that ClearVision PLC, a provider of on-demand distributed software development has become a charter member of the new CollabNet Global Business Partner Program.