Assembla Archive

Assembla describes their service as, “portal for software development, collaboration, and code management.” We first posted about Assembla in January 2008 when we interviewed Assembla president Andy Singleton. Earlier this year Assembla partnered with oDesk.

Today Assembla has announced the launch of their “private install” model. Private Assembla is a dedicated server that contains the same software that runs the main Assembla service.  From what I can tell, it looks like a white label plus additional features offering.

There are three options with Private Assembla: download, run in the Amazon EC2 cloud, managed option where Assembla manages the private install.

Pricing for the download option starts at $3,000 for a perpetual license and a year of support. The Amazon option starts at $1/hour and the managed option starts at $2,000/month. There are also additional options for support and installation.

Assembla is easiest to describe as a project management service. I haven’t heard much from Assembla since I interviewed their President Andy Singleton last year. Today Assembla is announcing a new partnership with outsourcing marketplace oDesk. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

The partnership will bring Assembla’s tools to the oDesk workers. Assembla’s tools include subversion and git code repositories, ticketing, collaboration, multi-project portfolios, and project management.

Assembla’s community of users will also be able to directly connect with the workforce on oDesk. Today’s partnership should give Assembla a new level of visibility into their target market.

Assembla is easiest to describe as a project management service. They have an interesting blog which combines product announcements with other important industry conversation similar to how AdaptiveBlue’s blog combines product announcements with semantic web discussion.

Assembla is based in Boston, has 10 team members with 6 full-time and has raised $400k in founder funding and one angel investor since they began. To learn more about the company, I spoke with President Andy Singleton. Andy believes their tools are "great" in terms of form and function. 

The workspace product has several thousand current customers with most using the free version. Workspaces can be set as public or private (sample workspace) and have a full set of project management tools included. One of the features they recently added is basically a clone of ConceptShare, one of our favorite tools around these parts. When they spoke with their customers, they found that many were using ConceptShare (or similar tools) and built the functionality into Assembla to help keep the customer on-site.

Their policy on free vs. paid is similar to Zoho in that all small team features are free and they are charging a fee for larger features and for larger companies.

The other piece of Assembla service is the staffing side. Andy is quick to note that while most of their talent is offshore, it’s not the same as oDesk, but more like an outsourcing company but with lower fees and higher productivity. You can read about my opinion on oDesk. Here’s a blog post from Andy on why offshoring is dead.

They are working on very large projects of the $100k scale and are looking to build longlasting teams. They use a trial method by using a small project to begin with rather than using monitoring as oDesk does. Assembla can also help you qualify employees for a small fee and they also manage distributed teams across the world. So far they have 600 practitioners have signed up to be included in the talent directory.