CollabNet buys Enlite software company

Software development tools company CollabNet was set to announce on Monday that it has acquired Enlite Networks, a maker of project management software for the electronics industry.

Founded in March 2000 by former Cadence Design Systems executive GopinathGanapathy, Enlite had been quietly developing a suite of project management software, called iGrid, aimed at the computer-aided electronics design market. The software allows managers to monitor various aspects of the product design process and gives them a centralized view of things such as changes in design requirements, software bug rates, and the status of important deliverables.

Advanced Micro Devices is an early customer of Enlite, according to CollabNet Chief Executive Officer Bill Portelli, and the chipmaker’s vice president of personal connectivity solutions, Mike Johnson, is a member of Enlite’s advisory board.

The deal, which was signed last week, effectively doubles the size of CollabNet’s engineering staff to about 70 and it adds iGrid to CollabNet’s portfolio of collaborative software development tools.

Financial details of the acquisition, including the value of the deal, were not disclosed. Enlite is based in Mountain View, Calif., though its development staff is based in Chennai, India.

CollabNet was founded in 1999 by former Apache Software Foundation President Brian Behlendorf, with the goal of building a commercial software development product based on open-source collaborative development principles.

Since its inception, CollabNet has parlayed its credibility in the open source world into a number of deals to build open-source developer portals for technology vendors such as Sun Microsystems and RealNetworks, but the company has recently been expanding its horizons.

“They really came from the open-source community, and now they’re starting to sell to corporate IT,” said Forrester Research Vice President Liz Barnett.

So far, CollabNet has acquired a handful of corporate IT customers, including investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, a subsidiary of Dresdner Bank, and Barclay’s Bank’s Global Investors unit, which is using CollabNet’sSourceCast for a variety of distributed software development projects. The Enlite acquisition appears designed to make SourceCast more appealing to corporate IT.

The Enlite software is “aimed at the higher-level decision making processes that engineering managers, program managers and business executives care about,” according to Portelli.

CollabNet will announce by September its plans to integrate the Enlite software into its SourceCast product line, and SourceCast customers will be able to use the new features by the end of 2003, Portelli said.

As a result of the acquisition, Behlendorf will move out of his role as vice president of engineering and focus full time on his other job as CollabNet’s chief technology officer, Portelli said. Ganapathy will assume the vice president of engineering title, he added.