By Thor Olavsrud,
InternetNews.com
CollabNet Monday snapped up
New York-based Web services firm Alphanumerica Inc..
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
CollabNet is a provider of open source collaborative software
development platforms and services and the acquisition brings it
employees that can build sophisticated Web sites to serve as
communities for open source programmers. CollabNet already hosts
open-source programming sites for customers like Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.
Bill Portelli, president and chief executive officer of
CollabNet, said the combined company would focus on creating the
next generation of global, collaborative software development
environments. He added that Alphanumerica’s expertise in Web site
and Web application development would allow for rapid deployment of
the new development environments.
Alphanumerica has a history with CollabNet. The two companies
were already working together on building collaborative software
development environments for Sun’s OpenOffice.org project and Oracle’s OTN
Xchange. Also it has built out several new online communities,
including the recently re-launched CollabNet and SourceXchange sites.
“Our teams have been working together for several months and we
look forward to continuing to complete projects for CollabNet
customers, as well as taking on new challenges,” said Kerry
Fitzpatrick, co-founder and chief operating officer of
Alphanumerica.
In the years since Alphanumerica’s founding in 1997, the company
has developed a name for itself in the open source community. It
has been a significant contributor to the Mozilla Web browser project and
sponsored the first two Mozilla Developer Meetings. Its customers
include Netscape, The Alan
Guttmacher Institute, The Brooklyn Public Library and Bedford,
Freeman & Worth Publishing Group.