Michael Dolan Dot Com

Monday, April 16th, 2007

Stuart Cohen launches Collaborative Software Initiative (for profit startup)

I think this is an outstanding move – there are a number of industries that know they need this (ahem… Healthcare, Financial Services). The proof will have easy metrics: code generated, problems solved, standards implemented, and dollars saved. One difference is CSI (ughh… hate the acronym) is a for profit company unlike Stuart’s former OSDL. Evan Bauer has also joined on as CTO… not a bad initial team there ;-)

The services offered:

Collaboration & Community Building
The CSI recruits and assembles the core customer team, including both business managers and software developers, to meet the requirements of the project.

Project Management
The CSI maps team resources to project requirements and ensures milestones are met, including testing and validation. The CSI manages the entire process – start to finish – allowing developers to work solely on code and business managers to monitor progress and provide ongoing input.

Technical Support & Maintenance
The CSI team provides installation, training and maintenance of the final product for the core customer team, and to a wider set of customers who require the same tools.

OSS Foundation Development & Management
Once a project is completed, the CSI can establish and manage nonprofit entities where the open source software code can live and be accessed. Best practices for each project will be made available to the community.

Former Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) CEO Stuart Cohen today launched a new company that will solve shared enterprise IT problems by bringing together companies to develop software at half the cost of outsourcing. The company, Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI), is pioneering a market-changing process that applies open source methodologies to business communities facing similar IT challenges.

Evan Bauer, financial services industry veteran and former chief technology officer at Credit Suisse First Boston, will partner with Cohen to lead the projects and develop the technology architecture as chief technology officer for CSI.