Just shy of a year after acquiring SourceForge Enterprise, CollabNet has taken a major step towards converging the products with the latest version of its virtualized test offering, CUBiT. Specifically, the new version, CUBiT 1.5, now supports both CollabNet’s web development platform, and SourceForge’s locally-installed software.

To recap, CUBiT creates testbed images that can be deployed at will. The idea is that, when you test software, you want to be sure that you are testing on the same environment, with the same software configurations, to get apples-to-apples comparisons. It’s a market that has also drawn infrastructure players like VMware, whose Lab Director product came from the Akimbi acquisition a couple years ago; and Surgient, a still-independent provider of test lab automation.

With CUBiT 1.5, you’ll be able to provision test environments whose images are maintained on CollabNet Enterprise servers in the cloud, or SourceForge servers that are locally deployed.

Of course, this is only the start, as CollabNet is still in the process of integrating the core SCM (source code management) products from both lineages. But later in the year, CollabNet will add more tracking and user role management capabilities to CUBiT. The guiding notion is that this comes in pretty handy given the server sprawl that is common across large enterprises.

In differentiating its offerings from VMware and Surgient, CollabNet claims it has more of a developer focus, starting with the plug-in that it offers for Eclipse, whereas it claims that the others are aimed more at server admins. On the horizon, CollabNet plans similar plug-ins to Visual Studio and with Sun’s NetBeans. Support of NetBeans is attributable the company’s alliance with Sun, which bundles CUBiT on the Sun Blade 6000 modular server and brands it the Virtualized Development Platform.

 CUBiT 1.5 is available now.

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