- Bull’s collaborative development platform to become part of the OW2 community and be published on the OW2 Web site
- OW2′s current development platform to be migrated to NovaForge during 2010
Bull and OW2 today announce that NovaForge is now available from OW2. The collaborative development platform – based on Open Source software tools – will become part of the OW2 community.
NovaForge was launched by Bull in 2007, as part of its industrial approach to the world of Open Source. Designed as a true ‘software factory’, NovaForge is based around a collection of services, and Open Source tools and components deployed by Bull’s R&D teams in their own distributed development programs and involving numerous Open Source communities. NovaForge already uses a number of technologies developed as a result of OW2 projects, including eXo Platform, and has been enriched through innovative projects such as Coclico – recently qualified by the Systematic and Minalogic competitiveness clusters and co-ordinated by Bull – as well as the international Qualipso initiative, financed by the European Commission.
A single aim: open innovation, to improve the quality of software development
NovaForge is designed to meet the complex challenges of developing business applications in an open world, and makes the most of best practice, industrialized service processes and extensive return on experience. NovaForge is used by Bull as part of its own collaborative development offering, Virtual ShoreTM, and currently hosts over 500 projects for organizations across every sector of the economy – industry, defense, the public sector, local authorities, banks, media and telecoms companies… – who either use the platform in hosted mode or installed at their own locations. NovaForge sources are also accessible via NovaForge.org, the on-line open software forum created by Bull.
“We have gathered together best practice in software development in this powerful, secure and easy-to-use tool,” comments Jean-Pierre Barbéris, General Manager of Bull Services and Solutions. “Today, NovaForge is being made available via the OW2 consortium, a move which is in line with our corporate social responsibility principles: a shared aim to tackle the key constraints of costs, timescales and quality, ensuring that everyone has access to the best technologies, and collaborative design of innovative solutions.”
For OW2, moving over to NovaForge represents a major improvement in the technology services provided to the community. “First and foremost, the OW2 consortium is a community of developers, and the software forge is the fundamental platform for all our activities,” explains Cédric Thomas, CEO of OW2. “As an organization with a long-term remit, we believe that developers are our most important customers; ensuring their effectiveness is one of our key roles. Which is why we are very proud to be able to offer them an innovative, state-of-the-art production environment, with NovaForge. We plan to complete the migration to Novaforge by the end of Q3 2010.”
