IBM Acquires BuildForge to Fill Gaps in Change Management

IBM has announced its acquisition of BuildForge, an Austin, Texas, developer of lifecycle tools for automating and streamlining the development process, particularly as it relates to compliance initiatives. Big Blue plans to incorporate BuildForge and its products into its Rational business.

BuildForge was founded in 2001, and has attracted about 65 buyers of its BuildForge products, which include FullControl, a build and release management tool that supports Rational ClearCase, CVS, Perforce change management systems, and development in Java, .NET, and other languages; FullThrottle, a release “acceleration” tool for turning “idle servers into optimized build clusters;” and Prism, which lets developers access the FullThrottle build and release processes from the IDE of their choice.

BuildForge is a particularly good fit for IBM because more than 80 percent of BuildForge’s customers are already using IBM’s Rational tools to manage their development processes.

“The acquisition of BuildForge will ultimately help customers more effectively govern their software and systems development,” says Danny Sabbah, general manager of IBM’s Rational Software group. “BuildForge closes the gap between writing code, building an application, and releasing it into production.”

Terms of the acquisition were not released.