VANCOUVER, British Columbia – November 18, 2009 – Today, ActiveState, the dynamic languages company, launched Firefly, a hosted project management and collaboration solution for managing commercial software development projects. As a turn-key solution, Firefly comes pre-configured with integrated source code revision control and code hosting, project management, issue and time tracking, and collaboration tools like wikis, blogs and forums. Firefly eases administrative pain that goes hand-in-hand with software development and makes it easy to share information between team members and customers.
With Firefly, software and web development teams in large enterprises and small-to-medium sized businesses can become more productive, more efficient and deliver higher quality software projects on time. Firefly simplifies project management with built-in systems to track and manage features, bugs and team tasks. Managers can set clear priorities, understand dependencies and gain visibility into project status and progress.
“Putting a project management system in place can be challenging for small development teams,” said Shane Caraveo, Firefly Product Manager. “Nearly 20% of small development teams report they do not use a solution for source code hosting, project management or collaboration according to a recent survey. Free solutions can take significant time, knowledge and effort to install and configure while commercial solutions may lock you in. As a commercial solution built on the open source Trac system, Firefly gives you the best of both worlds providing you with a reliable, easy to use solution without any contract.”
Caraveo added, “With a system like Firefly in place, developers can focus on what they need to do, rather than spending precious time configuring and maintaining system necessary for their work. Firefly provides the management infrastructure that helps developers keep the correct focus during their projects.”
Built with small development teams in mind, Firefly is a hosted, centralized and secure environment where development teams can work on projects anytime, anywhere, and simultaneously without conflict. Firefly standout features include:
- Pre-configured and ready to use; easy permissions management and privacy for team members
- Integrated source code hosting, revision control, issue tracking, and version control with Subversion and Mercurial
- Project management tools for tracking time, workflow, project progress, milestones and team work activity
- Collaboration tools including wikis, blogs and forums
- Visibility into project status at a glance for managing milestones effectively
Firefly offers peace of mind with enterprise-grade security and continuous data backup using Amazon’s secure EC2 datacenters and encrypted communications via SSL. Firefly also integrates with a development team’s current toolset, including IDEs, third-party wiki editors and other applications with the XML-RPC and JSON API.
Availability & Pricing
Firefly is now available in four editions to suit development teams and independent developers: Team ($39/month), Professional ($19/month), Solo ($9/month), and Community (free). For more information about Firefly and the editions, visit www.activestate.com/firefly.
About ActiveState
ActiveState, established in 1997, creates and provides professional business solutions and industry-recognized tools for corporations and developers who use dynamic languages including Perl, Python, and Tcl. Its open source language distributions – ActivePerl, ActivePython and ActiveTcl – are renowned for their quality and relied upon by companies and developers worldwide. ActiveState is owned by its employees and Pender Financial Group, a private merchant bank focused on technology in British Columbia. For more information, visit www.activestate.com.
Contact Information
For media inquiries, contact:
Liliya Apostolova
ActiveState
778.786.1134
liliyaa@activestate.com
