Agile Equity: Transactions

San Francisco, CA
August 21, 2000

CollabNet(TM), a leading provider of collaborative software development platforms and services based on open source tools and principles, today announced it has acquired Alphanumerica, Inc, a Web services firm based in New York City. The combined company will be called CollabNet.

"We believe our two companies share a common vision for creating the next generation of global, collaborative software development environments. Alphanumerica has a track record of outstanding success both with its customers and with the open source community, particularly with their strong leadership and sophisticated project management processes," said Bill Portelli, president and CEO, CollabNet. "By combining CollabNet's expertise in collaborative development practices with Alphanumerica's background in Web site and Web application development, we will truly be able to offer our customers rapid implementation of new Web-based software development environments."

Founded in 1997, Alphanumerica uses a proven approach to Web site development based on open source practices and industry standards for technical project management, as well as certain processes, technologies and techniques developed in-house. Alphanumerica is already a well-known player in the open source community. Over the past year, the firm has gained recognition for its commitment of significant resources to the Mozilla Web browser project. In addition, Alphanumerica also sponsored the first two Mozilla Developer Meetings, which brought together Mozilla developers from around the world. Other Alphanumerica customers include: Netscape Communications Corp., The Alan Guttmacher Institute, The Brooklyn Public Library, and Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group.

"Alphanumerica's philosophy has centered around seamlessly integrating design and technology to meet our customers’ needs, using open standards and open source technologies," said Joshua Lerner, co-founder and CEO of Alphanumerica. "CollabNet is quickly becoming recognized as a company that is advancing the collaborative development processes that are at the core of the open source model. Because of the numerous synergies between our companies, we saw it as a natural extension of our business to merge with CollabNet."

Alphanumerica is already working with CollabNet on building collaborative software development environments for Sun's OpenOffice.org and Oracle's OTN Xchange, and has been instrumental in building out several new online communities including the recently re-launched CollabNet and SourceXchange sites.

"This is an exciting opportunity for our companies to join together in developing the integrated Web infrastructure that will spur a new wave of collaborative software development," said Kerry Fitzpatrick, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Alphanumerica. "Our teams have already been working together for several months and we look forward to continuing to complete projects for current CollabNet customers, as well as taking on new challenges."

About CollabNet

CollabNet provides companies with tools and services for collaborative software development by combining open source community expertise with business excellence. CollabNet's offerings include: a developer marketplace, a collaborative development platform with lifecycle management capabilities, and consulting services to facilitate software development across a worldwide community. CollabNet is currently working with customers ranging from Application Service Providers (ASPs) to Internet firms, hardware and software providers to companies from industries such as marketing and publishing. Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, founded CollabNet in July 1999. For more information, see www.collab.net.