Rapidly moving WANdisco is going all out for market reach with the acquisition of the TortoiseSVN.Net Community Website. Having bolstered its software assets and significantly accelerated its Hadoop development and capabilities with the AltoStor acquisition last year (see here), this investment is about mindshare and sales lead generation directly from the developer community as much as gaining a new piece of technology. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but the company refers to a “nominal fee.”
TortoiseSVN.Net is the web site for the open source TortoiseSVN client for Windows, which in turn is a client for the Subversion source/version control product. The salient point is that the TortoiseSVN client is widely used by software engineers and by buying the site and client WANdisco is exposing itself to a bigger audience. The intention is to convert users from the free version of Subversion products to WANdisco’s paid for offerings and services. Although there are many Subversion clients available, the web site claims 500,000 unique visitors per month and supports over five million downloads each year so WANdisco will get much more exposure, which marks this out as a smart acquisition. Stefan Küng, the lead developer for TortoiseSVN, will join WANdisco to ensure ongoing development.
With its focus on high availability software that supports big data and distributed software development, WANdisco is making rapid progress, particularly in the US (see here). By tapping directly into the software engineer base it is further making its mark as an early mover.