Tomorrow CVSDude, provider of hosted software development environments, will announce a partnership with oDesk, an online marketplace for developers. The deal will eventually result in an oDesk branded version of CVSDude’s technology.
These two companies are a natural fit for one other. Whereas oDesk helps developers from all over the world find clients, and vice versa, CVSDude provides tools that help developers collaborate with each other and share their work with clients. In particular, CVSDude hosts version control systems that enable developers, perhaps located continents apart, to work on the same set of code without having to worry about redundancy and conflicts.
This partnership will start as a cross-promotional one with oDesk and CVSDude generating leads for each other from their respective sites. But CVSDude has also been developing an API that will soon allow them to license their technology to oDesk for rebranding purposes. oDesk will be the first to use the API, although CVSDude says that it is seeking other partners as well.
The ease with which companies can outsource work should be improved by this deal, since oDesk will become a one-stop shop for both finding developers and executing projects. While CVSDude says that 60% of its 40,000+ users are in the United States, many of its customers also log in from China and India.
CVSDude is located in Brisbane, Australia and has been in operation since 2002. While part of a government-funded incubator, the company is looking for its first round of angel investment.
This is an interesting concept, though, I think for most project, simply having one team in place to handle everything is still more efficient unless timeliness and budgets dictate otherwise. If 40K companies use this software solution already, that means there is a heck of a lot of potential growth to still happen considering I never heard of these guys before.
Who are their competitors? IBM, CGI, Microsoft?
Jon
http://buzvia.com - Share Influence
@Jon - I should have clarified; CVSDude has 40,000+ users and several thousand customers (aka company accounts).
Outsourcing my brown ass…IBM just fired 700 newly recruited workers at India - http://www.techbanyan.com/archives/146
wait a min..is the work moving to China?
I find it more interesting that oDesk is willing to phase out their existing CVS solution that was custom built for them.
Granted, we don’t use oDesks existing solution, and I am sure most other companies don’t either because, well, it sucked.
Its good to see that they are willing to move onto better things instead of holding onto something that isn’t working for them.
I had never heard of CVSdude before. All the Subversion ports in our office are currently being used by customers, and I was forced to use local subversion.
I just opened a CVSDude account and I am now using that for free. I dunno how long I can keep it under 2 megs, but if you don’t commit image files, then you are pretty much set. Losing images is no big deal anyway. You can just email them to the other developers and share the same username, to keep it free.
Looks like oDesk is keeping their SVN and promoting the one from CVSDude as an upgrade.
http://cvsdude.com/product.pl?pnrId=100
Oh, and the CVSDude promotion stuff is already live in my oDesk account.
We found my developer on there…. a year and half later he’s now our CTO
Mark - Thanks for covering this news. We’re excited about the partnership.
@ Joel - We’ll continue to offer our existing SVN solution which remains a free option and one that is integrated with your oDesk team room. CVSDude provides more fine-grained management of repository permissions and other goodies, though, if you desire a greater level of control.
@ Ryan - Thanks for sharing.
Mark- Thanks for the story- we are excited to provide hosting for oDesk’s customers, and their trusted online marketplace for developers will help our customers grow their own businesses.
Jon- You may not have heard of us because the industry / concept of commercial source code hosting, and providing essential change management tools as a service (i.e. Subversion, CVS, Trac, Bugzilla, etc.) is still somewhat novel. But it makes a lot of sense, saves a lot of money- and we’re lucky to have loyal customers (http://cvsdude.com/testimonials.pl). Competitors include any major software change management solution.
User 447- Your free plan is permanent, enjoy!
With all of this version tracking moving into web-based repositories, is there a future here for web-based IDEs where no real configuration of the workspace and repositories is required?
Maybe something similar to IBM’s Eclifox project, but served using the SaaS model?
We’ve seen office applications migrate to the web, why not an IDE?
this is what makes the internet beautiful… the rest is frosting… may all prosper gloriously
@Mark: As a Web 2.0 blog, you should promote companies like Unfuddle or SpringLoops, which have true Web 2.0 products and not one of the old-school purely hosting companies like CVSDude, wush.net, etc.
My question would be how much of the user base is actually using this option … I have written a review of odesk in this post