IBM and VA Software Corp. on Tuesday announced a software partnership at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.
Under the partnership, the two companies will jointly market and sell VA Software’s SourceForge enterprise open-source software that will offer full support to IBM’s DB2 database which will be available by the end of this year, according to a VA Software statement.
Scott Handy, Somers, N.Y.-based director of Linux solutions software for IBM, said VA’s endorsement of his company’s e-business infrastructure software and its scalability will be a “proof point” to both IBM customers and developers who use VA’s Web site.
Handy hopes that VA Software’s decision to use IBM applications will influence developers to do the same. The development market is one that IBM is very interested in courting, he added.
VA Software’s SourceForge will be integrated with a suite of IBM infrastructure, application development and system management tools, including DB2 database, WebSphere, WebSphere Studio and Tivoli. SourceForge will also be upgraded to run on IBM eServer xSeries Linux servers, the release stated.
“We are kind of getting two for the price of one here. They are not only going to update their site to use DB2 as the database (and) WebSphere as the Web application server, they will also use Tivoli for systems management, and use WebSphere Studio as the application development tools for this,” Handy explained.
The two companies are coming from different directions to meet for this partnership. IBM has decided to embrace open-source projects such as Linux and Apache, while already earning significant revenue from licensing its patents and through the sale of proprietary software. Meanwhile, VA, based in the open-source world, is trying to move toward proprietary software to boost sales.
In a separate announcement, OSDN, a subsidiary of VA Software, announced that SourceForge.net, the open source development Web site, will operate on IBM’s DB2 database software by mid-January.
The companies can be found on the Web at http://www.ibm.com and http://www.vasoftware.com.