Saturday, September 24, 2005

Open Workbench - News

Open Workbench - News

Niku Unveils Open Workbench:

First Open Source Alternative for Microsoft Project



Project Workbench ™ - Desktop Scheduler Used by More Than
100,000 Project Management Professionals - Now Available Free of Charge



Redwood City, Calif. — July 12, 2004 — Niku Corporation (Nasdaq: NIKU ), the leader in IT Management and Governance (IT - MG) solutions, today announced the launch of Open Workbench, the open source release of Project Workbench ™ , its popular project scheduling tool. In releasing Open Workbench, Niku is offering the first compelling and free alternative to Microsoft ® Project. Open Workbench is available today for download free of charge at www.openworkbench.org. Additionally, the source code will be available next month through SourceForge (www.sourceforge.net), the world’s largest open source software development web site.



“BBH has been very well served for more than ten years exclusively using Niku tools for scheduling our IT team. Quite simply, it does the job better than anything else,” said Rick Berk, CIO at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., an award - winning provider of global custody, FX, securities lending and brokerage services for many of the world’s most sophisticated mutual funds, investment managers, banks and insurance companies . “We applaud Niku’s move to align Workbench with the open source community, as we believe that having direct access to the software code can give us a new level of service and self - support, coupled with a new set of resources committed to evolving this already - excellent product.”

Workbench, also known as Project Workbench and ABT Workbench, is the trusted tool for more than 100,000 project management professionals around the world, in part because of its unique ability to generate schedules based on resource constraints. Now those users will be able to deploy Open Workbench free of charge throughout their enterprises. Additionally, open source developers will find a new community of business users interested in their enhancements and extensions.

“Desktop project scheduling tools, though nearly a billion -dollar market, are commodity products today,” said Matt Light, Gartner Group research director and chair of Gartner's Project Portfolio Management Research Community. “Open source project schedulers will allow vendors to focus on meeting the demand for the more complex applications of portfolio management as well as IT planning, governance and control.”

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