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Why SK Telecom chose SourceCast for collaborative development

By Rachel Chalmers
Tue, 12 Nov 2002
© 2002 the451.com

South Korea Telecom has chosen CollabNet's SourceCast platform as the basis of software development efforts for its NATE Internet portal. CollabNet's partner Nextel-Korea will customize and support SourceCast for the telecommunications company. NATE is SK Telecom's platform for mobile and wireless Internet service and software. The SourceCast deployment will let SK Telecom extend access to NATE development to key partners, including handset manufacturers Samsung, LG Electronics and SK Teletech, strategic partners such as Hewlett-Packard, and 500 content and software providers of games, ring tones, images, stock prices and other services.

Impact assessment

The message
CollabNet and its partner Nextel-Korea have sewn up a huge deal with SK Telecom. SourceCast will form the basis for NATE, SK Telecom's Internet portal, with 12 handset manufacturers and more than 500 software and content providers taking part.

Competitive landscape
Would-be CollabNet-killer OpenAvenue is long dead, but VA Software's SourceForge lives to compete with SourceCast. Further afield, Borland and Rational are both competitors and partners.

The451 assessment
This is just the kind of deal CollabNet needs to validate the SourceCast model. Conversely, it illustrates the benefits of SourceCast to the right customer: process-neutral, distributed development support, plus relatively easy customization through a local CollabNet partner.

Context

Founded in July 1999, CollabNet originally developed SourceCast as the underlying platform for its SourceXchange software development marketplace. The idea was that companies that would never adopt open source products might nevertheless benefit greatly from adopting the development processes that have made open source a success. Despite early support from HP, SourceXchange never really took off, and CollabNet turned to licensing SourceCast as a software product.

The package is designed specifically for Web-based collaboration, enabling geographically dispersed development teams to work together. It includes tools for revision control, issue tracking, mailing list creation and management, document and file management, project tracking and Web-based administration. The software is primarily designed for use in enterprise development networks, developer resource sites and open source projects. CollabNet also provides consulting services to back SourceCast up.

The company has 90 employees and 25 customers, including Barclay Global Investors, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, Nokia, Oracle, Progress Software and Sun Microsystems. In June 2000, CollabNet chalked up a $35m Series B funding round led by Bowman Capital, with participation from Dell Ventures, Hewlett Packard, Intel Capital, Niku, Novell, Opus360, Oracle, Sun and Turbolinux, as well as initial investor Benchmark Capital, WR Hambrecht & Co and Netscape veteran Marc Andreessen.

Technology

Nextel-Korea customized SourceCast for SK Telecom with a Web-based module for updating and viewing Microsoft project plans and an SMS server that hooks into mailing lists. This was obviously one important selling point from SK Telecom's point of view. SourceCast's other technical advantages included its ability to be distributed across different sites and the fact that it is process-neutral, meaning partners don't have to change their development methodology just to participate in NATE. The same reasoning has seen SourceCast sell into other sites where multiple locations make it difficult to collaborate. One particular emerging market for the software is among firms taking advantage of comparatively low-cost offshore development.

Competition

Not every company needs SourceCast, but just as its potential customers are limited, so CollabNet's competitors are thin on the ground. One-time rival OpenAvenue is long gone. A remnant of once-proud hardware vendor VA now licenses the software that underlies its SourceForge developer network, but sales don't seem to be going especially well. VA managed to lose almost $19m over the quarter ending July 27 2002, compared with $8m for the three months ending April 27 2002. In August 2002, the company trumpeted a deal with IBM as crucial validation of its model, but financial terms were not disclosed.

Further afield are tools giants Borland and Rational. Borland made a lot of noise about its TeamSource platform in July 2001, but CollabNet's VP of marketing Bernie Mills claims he has never seen the product installed in a customer environment. He admits there is a tendency for companies that have already invested in traditional source code management tools from the likes of Rational to try to add the distributed Web-based project management elements of SourceCast in-house.

That said, CollabNet partners with Borland and Rational as often as it competes with them. The company promises future announcements around integration and interoperability with tools from vendors such as these. What CollabNet offers is more than source code management, says Mills. It's a Web-based development platform with the kind of robust security and permissions it's very hard for in-house developers to replicate economically. Deals like this one with SK Telecom go a long way toward illustrating the value proposition.

SWOT analysis

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