Microsoft Ups The ALM Ante With Its Bet On Teamprise

November 16, 2009
Microsoft Ups The ALM Ante With Its Bet On Teamprise
Expect VS 2010 To Accelerate The Shakeout In The Application Life-Cycle Management Market
by Jeffrey S. Hammond
with Mike Gilpin and Adam Knoll

Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) has proven very popular with .NET developers but not so much with Eclipse developers. This presents a problem for Microsoft, because many of its largest customers develop for both .NET and Java and want a consolidated application life-cycle management (ALM) solution that will support development teams regardless of what platform they use. Over the past few years, Microsoft has pointed to a partner’s product — SourceGear’s Teamprise Client Suite — as its recommended solution to the heterogeneity problem. This has proven unsatisfactory to many customers, so after a long internal debate, Microsoft has acquired the Teamprise code base. Microsoft will release an updated version of Teamprise as part of its Visual Studio 2010 release train and will reduce the new solution’s overall per-developer cost. The resulting product combination will prove much more attractive to large enterprises, which will now have the option of a lower-cost ALM solution for all the platforms they use, supported by the full force of Microsoft.