CollabNet expanding in Asia with new datacenter

CollabNet plans to expand in Asia with a new datacenter and other investments, as demand picks up in the region for its collaborative software development platform, according to an executive of the company.

The company’s datacenter, the first in Asia, will be set up by the end of the first quarter of next year, said Vaughan Woods, CollabNet’s vice president for Asia Pacific.

CollabNet of Brisbane, California,offers a managed service for geographically distributed software development.

The company currently has a primary datacenter and a “hot standby” datacenter, both located in California, but separated by hundreds of miles, according to Woods. After the new datacenter in the Asia Pacific region is up, CollabNet will be able to offer greater geographical redundancy to customers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, he added.

However, the initial focus of the new datacenter is on customers in Asia, where the company is seeing growing interest in its platform. New demand for the company’s platform is coming predominantly from Japan, China, and India as well as ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries such as Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia, Woods said.

Although systems integrators make up a large part of CollabNet’s customer base in Asia, the company is also seeing demand from corporations, Woods said.

These are customers doing geographically distributed development, and who are looking for a state-of-the-art collaborative environment to do so, Woods said. Some of the customers want to utilize a collaborative environment to develop a service-oriented architecture (SOA), thereby ensuring standards are adhered to and maximum reuse is achieved, he added.

CollabNet will service customers in Japan, China and India directly, while in ASEAN countries like Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia it will use its business partner program, called “Software as a Service partner program”, according to Woods. The program will be launched in Asia in the first quarter of next year, he added.

As part of its expansion in Asia, CollabNet is also setting up subsidiaries in China and Japan, and its Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore. Once this is complete, the company will have over 100 staff in the region including the staff at its development center in India and representative office in Korea, Woods said. The company may also look at other locations in Asia to do product development, besides its current one in India, he added.