Heavy Hitters Bring New Meaning to Collaborative Software Development

PORTLAND, Ore., October 24, 2007 — Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI), which introduces a market-changing process that applies open source methodologies to business communities facing common IT challenges, today announced it is partnering with CollabNet, the leading provider of collaborative software development solutions for distributed organizations.

CSI will use CollabNet’s development platform to facilitate collaboration among its customers to share the cost of meeting the same compliance, regulatory and public service requirements.

An increase in the number and complexity of compliance and regulatory requirements in sectors such as financial services and government led to the formation of CSI earlier this year. CSI solves shared enterprise IT problems by bringing together companies within the same industries to develop software at a fraction of the cost. It’s currently working with financial services firms and state and local government agencies to develop compliance applications that address today’s most critical issues.

“Entire industries are looking at new ways to develop internal software applications while saving time and money. CSI has put all the right pieces in place to enable this new development strategy and CollabNet will help us to further deliver on the transformation taking place in IT departments,” said Stuart Cohen, CEO of CSI. “CollabNet is one of the leading pioneers in software development and also shares our philosophy on open source models, which makes them a natural partner for us.”

"CSI is taking both open source and collaboration to a new level with its innovative business model – a model that is saving business and IT managers valuable time and money while at the same time accelerating innovative applications,” said Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet. “We’re very interested in the work we’re doing with CSI and are happy to provide the platform needed to facilitate distributed and collaborative development where teams work together across regions, time zones and companies.”

CSI forms communities based on common IT requirements within vertical industries and provides essential functions for developing Collaborative Software. This includes project management, development, testing and support for the code. CSI offers the software to a broad base of customers under the open source licensing or Software as a Service (SaaS) models.

About Collaborative Software Initiative
Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI) was founded in 2007 by Stuart Cohen, a veteran IT executive and former chief executive officer at the Open Source Development Labs. Cohen has partnered with Evan Bauer, financial services industry veteran and former chief technology officer at Credit Suisse, to bring together like-minded companies to build software applications at half the cost of outsourcing. CSI introduces a market-changing process that applies open source methodologies to building Collaborative Software - software developed or acquired by a variety of companies at a fraction of internal developer or outsourcing costs. For more information, please visit www.csinitiative.com.