CollabNet Eyeing IPO

According to Gartner, global spending on SaaS is projected to grow by 18% this year to $14.5 billion. Growth is projected to continue through 2015 when the SaaS market spend will grow to $22.1 billion. Mature markets of North America, Europe and Japan will see growth of more than 16% each. North America will remain the biggest bringing in $9.1 billion, followed by Western Europe’s $3.2 billion share. Japan is the smallest market segment with SaaS spending projected to grow to $495.2 million from $427 million. Emerging markets of APAC and LATAM will see continued adoption as SaaS spends grow more than 25% each to $934.1 million and $331.1 million respectively.
CollabNet’s Financials
Brisbane, California–based CollabNet was founded in 1999 by Tim O’Reilly and Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache project. It was founded as a software-as-a-service company for the open source community. Its first customers included HP and Sun. Today, CollabNet is a global leader for cloud development and agile application life cycle management (ALM) products and services. It is also known for its Subversion project, which helps organizations keep track of their intellectual property.

CollabNet’s tools help enable teams to work on the development of software irrespective of their own location while ensuring lower infrastructure costs and increased productivity. Using their platform, project members can work as a single team throughout the life cycle of a project and have shared access to the organization’s software assets.

CollabNet earns licensing revenues by charging customers for access on a per-user, per-month basis. Researchers estimate that CollabNet earns annual revenues of over $40 million from more than five million users spread across more than 5,000 organizations and 17,000 development projects. Its earnings are not known, but the CEO, Bill Portelli, has confirmed that the company is cash positive. It has received venture funding of $20.6 million from Benchmark Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Mr. Portelli, Intel Capital, Industry Ventures, and WR Hambrecht.

Analysts predict that CollabNet may soon be eying the IPO market. CollabNet management hasn’t confirmed the news but did say that they were evaluating all options.

CollabNet’s Expanding Product Offerings
CollabNet has been investing in developing several new PaaS offerings. Recently, it released its source version control technology to the cloud with CloudForge. CloudForge is a self-service version of its existing ALM platform and source code repository that can operate on both public and private clouds. The tool will allow development teams to manage project life cycles on public cloud services from Amazon, Joyent, Google App Engine, and Force.com and will also work on clouds based on CloudFoundry. The service comes with features such as centralized role-based security, automated backup, and simplifying compliance needed to code, connect, and deploy applications within clouds.

CollabNet is also launching is Marketplace, where developers can buy add-on tools and services from their partners such as Cornerstone, ALMWorks, BrainEngine, SOASTA, New Relic, and Zendesk.

CollabNet believes that by the end of the year, it will be able to add hybrid cloud services to their existing offerings. The provision of elastic server provisioning for build, test, and deployment is among the planned expanded offerings.