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Tasktop Technologies Solidifies Position As De-facto Standard For ALM Integration During Strong 2012
[January 09, 2013]

Tasktop Technologies Solidifies Position As De-facto Standard For ALM Integration During Strong 2012


VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 9, 2013 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Tasktop Technologies (www.tasktop.com), creators of the Eclipse Mylyn open source tools and a leader in Agile ALM integration and productivity, saw its business grow by 250 percent during 2012 as the coming of age of Agile and developer-centric collaboration tools drove the need for integrated and best-of-breed Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) stacks. In 2012, Tasktop strengthened its position as the industry leader in ALM integration with new OEM deals with key ALM vendors, including IBM, HP and CA. It also extended its ecosystem of integrations to encompass the latest cloud-based offerings, including Microsoft TFS, the Oracle Developer Cloud Service and Atlassian OnDemand. As a result, the company grew rapidly throughout the year, nearly doubling in size, opening a new headquarters in Vancouver, a new office in Austin, and adding industry thought leader Dave West to its leadership team.



"At the outset of 2012, many were expecting consolidation in the ALM market, due to the proliferation of Agile and ALM tools we saw the year prior," said Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop and creator of the open source Eclipse Mylyn project. "Instead, we saw the reverse, with both established players and incumbents launching new offerings, often differentiated by being tailored to a particular stage of the lifecycle. Stakeholder-specific tools have become a fundamental and beneficial part of the modern ALM stack. But they cannot deliver benefits with an infrastructure that supports cross-tool collaboration and visibility. Tasktop's growth in 2012 is a result of our multi-year investment in establishing the open-source platform, partnerships and customer base needed to create the first collaborative infrastructure for connecting the increasingly heterogeneous world of software delivery." Tasktop is the only company dedicated to solving the "integration" problem of the increasingly complex, fragmented, heterogeneous and hybrid make up of today's tool stacks needed to build and deploy software. Its products are built on the industry-standard Eclipse Mylyn Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) interoperability framework that connects desktops, servers, teams and departments together to synchronize tasks and projects. Tasktop Sync provides real-time synchronization, automatic conflict resolution, and support for more than two dozen ALM tools. It unifies heterogeneous ALM stacks by allowing developers, testers, business analysts and managers to work within their best-of-breed tools of choice, while automatically maintaining traceability across ALM artifacts. Tasktop Dev brings the functionality of Sync to the developers' desktop by providing a unified and developer-centric view on the ALM stack within the Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs.

Highlights for Tasktop in 2012 include:Business Growth - during 2012, Tasktop continued its strong, organic growth with sales bookings increasing 250 percent and the company's staff growing to more than 50. The company expanded its North American footprint with a new office in Austin, TX and an expanded office in Vancouver, BC, where the company is headquartered and won several awards, including the "Forty Under 40" for Tasktop co-founder Kersten and "Best Companies to Work" in British Columbia. In addition, Tasktop was recognized internationally for its industry contributions, being named a finalist for a prestigious World Technology Award in the IT Software category along with recognition from leading industry analyst Ovum Research for being "On the Radar," for application lifecycle management integration. Eclipse Mylyn, the open source project Tasktop continues to lead, also saw sharp growth and is now downloaded more than 2 million times per month.


De-facto Integration Standard - Tasktop continues to be the partner and technical solution of choice for IT organizations and tool vendors looking to achieve more efficiency, consistency and quality in their software development activities. Currently, Tasktop supports and connects more than 70 development and deployment tools through its Mylyn-based Task Federation platforms. During the year, the company also signed major OEM deals with IBM, CA and HP, further extending Tasktop's integration solutions into a growing number of leading global IT organizations. Other major announcements included Tasktop Sync support for Microsoft Team Foundation Server and ThoughtWorks Studios Mingle. It also launched Tasktop Sync Studio, innovative functionality that provides the industry's first visual ALM mapping and monitoring tool for ALM architects Industry Thought Leadership - Tasktop remained committed to its mission to connect the world of software delivery through industry thought leadership. It's involvement in the open source community remains strong, as it leads the Eclipse Mylyn project, and Kersten continues to serve as a Sustaining Member Representative on the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors. He also serves on the Steering Committee of the Open Standards for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) project, and leads Tasktop's involvement with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to support bringing OSLC protocols for Linked Data to the W3C. During the year Tasktop also hired one of the most influential software industry thought leaders in Dave West, a long-time technologist, executive and industry analyst with Forrester Research. West, serving as chief product officer for Tasktop, has written and published numerous articles, and spoken at key industry events, to advance the adoption and best practices for integrating the software development lifecycle. Other highlights included a Tasktop/Oracle joint presentation at JavaOne and Kersten's keynote at EclipseCon 2012 on the Impact of Open Source Practices on Enterprise and Agile ALM.

"The past year was a breakout one for Tasktop as many organizations have accepted the inherent heterogeneity in their development processes and tool stacks, and have come to realize that connecting these workflows and tools are critical to on-time and high-quality software delivery," said Neelan Choksi, president and COO for Tasktop. "There are many factors pushing a connected application development organization to the forefront in 2013, including new challenges with regulations, distance working, decentralized IT and developer populism. Tasktop is excited to work with our customers and partners to tackle these new problems, and create new opportunities to advance the art of building and deploying software." Share This: #Tasktop becomes standard for #ALM integration - #software #Agile #opensource tool vendors rely on www.tasktop.com About Tasktop Technologies Tasktop Technologies aims to transform the productivity of software delivery by unifying Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and empowering developers with task-focused tools. Tasktop invented the task-focused interface and created the popular Eclipse Mylyn project, which transformed the developer's IDE experience to center around ALM tool-based collaboration. Building on top of Mylyn, Tasktop has been unifying the ALM landscape with its broad ecosystem of ALM partnerships that connect disparate tools from leading Agile, enterprise ALM and open source offerings. Tasktop's Task Federation(TM) technology builds on this ecosystem to unify heterogeneous ALM stacks by allowing developers, testers and managers to work within their best-of-breed tools of choice, while automatically maintaining traceability and visibility across ALM artifacts. The company's Tasktop Sync provides the only real-time bidirectional and fully automated synchronization between ALM servers. Tasktop Dev is the developer-centric ALM interface for the Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs, making it dramatically easier for developers to work and collaborate, while keeping ALM tools up-to-date with development activity. For more information visit http://tasktop.com Media Contact:Christie DennistonCatapult [email protected]: 303-581-7760, ext. 13M: 303-827-5164 SOURCE Tasktop Technologies

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