Version control and source code management company Perforce Software Inc. just announced its acquisition of Seapine Software Inc., a provider of application lifecycle management solutions, to expand its portfolio of enterprise developer and designer tools.

From the drawing board to under the customer’s fingers, developing and deploying an application passes through many hands in the enterprise and the tools that compile, test, configure, install and deploy must work together. By acquiring Seapine’s Application Lifecycle Management solution, Perforce expects to accelerate enterprise application development and delivery cycles by making lifecycle management more efficient.

This product fusion could make Perforce a better platform for teams implementing DevOps practices–a paradigm where development teams work closely with operations teams to continually build, test and deploy applications and updates.

“The Seapine suite of products strongly complements the Perforce portfolio and both companies address many of the same enterprise product development needs including traceability, auditability and predictability of the development process for high-value assets,” said Janet Dryer, Perforce’s chief executive.

Seapine’s lifecycle management platform provides requirements management, issue tracking, software configuration management, automated software testing, load testing and test case management. The company’s software platform is designed to ease development in technology sectors that require particularly strict management and auditability needs such as regulated industries including life sciences, medical, automotive and financial services.

ALM catching on in enterprise DevOps

According to a report by IDC Research Inc., application lifecycle management is a key development standard that is growing in the enterprise development space with expectations of revenue exceeding $1.8 billion by 2019.

“Agile ALM is key to innovation and is becoming a norm to drive dynamic, modern software delivery as larger vendors provide options and existing agile providers evolve,” said Melinda Ballou, program director for IDC’s Application Lifecycle Management and Executive Strategies service.

With enterprise application development becoming more complex and deployment environments including multiple processes — such as mobile, social, cloud and big data analytics — teams implementing DevOps development practices.

“We expect the use of agile ALM to increase dramatically throughout the 2014–2019 forecast period,” Ballou added, “as cultural barriers are surmounted by effective process adoption, quick access to core capabilities via Software as a Service solutions, and use for DevOps with continuous release.”

The acquisition of Seapine by Perforce follows in the footsteps of industry leaders Rally Software, VersionOne and Atlassian forging similar partnerships in 2014 and 2015 — including the acquisition of Rally Software by CA Technologies — to build out offerings in this market space.

Perforce’s development version control system, collaboration engine and enterprise-grade Git ecosystem is called Helix. Details are available on Perforce’s Helix website.

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