CollabNet, Tata team on development platform

CollabNet Inc. and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) announced Monday that the two companies will jointly market a distributed development platform for software built around a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

The platform, called the Global Development Navigator (GDN), has been configured by TCS, India's largest software services outsourcer, around CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.0, a managed-services platform designed for distributed application lifecycle management and software development.

GDN, which will be a TCS brand, incorporates best practices in SOA development processes as well as technical frameworks for business application development, according to a statement Monday from CollabNet. The GDN will be part of TCS' SOA strategy around Java Enterprise Edition (J EE), the statement said.

While CollabNet will offer the infrastructure in the form of its managed-service offering for globally distributed development, TCS will offer the customer the company's intellectual property such as methodologies, best practices, and assets such as documents and templates, said Mike Kochanik, vice president for alliances of CollabNet Inc of Brisbane, California, in an interview Friday.

GDN provides the customer a complete solution which includes the process as well as the controls by which an organization can move from development of monolithic applications from a single location, to development of SOA components from multiple locations, Kochanik added.

This offering is expected to be particularly useful for the financial services sector, Kochanik said. Most projects in the financial services sector involve a distributed development environment that include at least New York and London, combined with an offshore location such as India or China, he added.

TCS of Mumbai is already using CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.0 in-house for the globally distributed delivery of projects, Kochanik said.

Besides bundling the GDN with the CollabNet platform, TCS will also offer systems integration, implementation, and offshore resources to clients, Kochanik said. "This makes TCS very different from our current resellers who don't add value of this type," he said.

TCS and CollabNet have worked out a revenue-sharing formula which gives TCS a share of CollabNet's revenue from the managed service it offers to TCS customers, according to Kochanik. TCS will however retain all the revenue from systems integration, implementation, outsourcing, and other services to its customers. In deals where CollabNet has bagged the order, TCS will provide these services to CollabNet as a contractor, and CollabNet would take a share of the revenue from these services, Kochanik said.

TCS executives were not immediately available for comment on the company's tie-up with CollabNet.

CollabNet and TCS plan to bring other processes from TCS on the CollabNet platform, such as its processes for .Net development and for implementations of enterprise software packages from Oracle Corp. and SAP AG, Kochanik said. The Application Lifecycle Manager in CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.0 allows the management of many different process templates within the same infrastructure for a client, he added.

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