Philips Medical Systems is a division of Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE:PHG) (AEX:PHI), the leading supplier of medical imaging equipment and related healthcare services, with 2005 sales of $8 billion. The division provides imaging equipment in X-ray, CT, MR, Ultrasound and nuclear medicine imaging, used to create images for radiologists and cardiologists. Its products are built around the Medical Imaging Platform (MIP) program, which serves as the technical base.

“As a multi-national organization, we manage globally distributed development resources for the Medical Imaging Platform program, the base of our products. Resources dispersed across three continents, in many teams, present a unique challenge,” says Jan Broekhuizen, Program Manager, Medical Imaging Platform at Philips Medical Systems. “Working with CollabNet’s development environment helps us accelerate time-to-market for products, effectively manage distributed development resources, and substantially improve the quality of the software components being developed.”

Philips Medical Systems had previously relied on conventional development platforms and tools that were not designed for use in heavily distributed teams and geographically dispersed sites. As an example, components delivered by one team did not provide the functionality that the other teams need. Presenting an alternative, CollabNet brings openness and flexibility that allow developers to collaborate in a highly distributed fashion and leverage existing tools and processes.

Selecting CollabNet as the basis for its new collaborative software development infrastructure, Philips Medical Systems launched an initiative to introduce open source principles into its internal software development efforts. The open approach relies on product teams having full read-only access to the platform’s development information, such as source code and team communication. Increased transparency enables product teams to adapt to another team’s approach and to leverage its software assets, while requiring a well-defined framework of distributed ownership and control over software assets.

Adopting open source principles for the development of Medical Imaging Platform significantly altered the requirements for the development environment because it was necessary to allow easy yet secure and gated access to development information across the wide area network. Philips Medical Systems rolled-out CollabNet Enterprise Edition after a thorough review of the level of security and the managed services. The division also uses SubversionTM, an open-source version control system sponsored by CollabNet.

“Philips Medical Systems is proof that open source best practices and frictionless collaboration work at the corporate level. They have demonstrated how an open and collaborative approach can transform software development into a more agile business,” said Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet. “More and more enterprises are realizing that there is untapped potential within their own teams that can turn into competitive advantage. We’re excited about the success our customers achieve as a result of CollabNet’s innovative development environment.”

About CollabNet

With more than 1 Million users, CollabNet is the most widely used collaborative software development platform. The company is transforming the way software is being developed by enabling many industry-leading companies to leverage global development talents to deliver better products and innovate faster.

Using CollabNet Enterprise Edition, project members can work as one team regardless of their location. Unlike traditional software development tools, CollabNet supports globally distributed teams in a cost-effective way, yielding unprecedented annual savings through reduced development infrastructure costs, increased productivity, improved project visibility and shared access to software assets. Founded upon open source principles, CollabNet is also the primary sponsor of the SubversionTM open source project, the new standard for version control.

CollabNet has been recognized for its leadership with 10 major industry awards in 2006 including the Red Herring and Always On TOP 100 Awards, and the SIIA Codie Award. Visit CollabNet at http://www.collab.net or get more information about Subversion at http://www.collab.net/subversion.

CollabNet is a registered trademark of CollabNet, Inc. or its affiliated companies. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.