How could you not fall in love with a company named AgileZen?  Today, Rally Software – a company I’ve been an investor in since 2003 – announced that they have acquired AgileZen.  If you are an Agile software development shop, or follow ALM, Rally just added Kanban to the mix.

This is the second acquisition Rally has made – the other was 6th Sense Analytics which they acquired at the beginning of 2009.  If you follow this blog, you know that I’m a big fan of having established companies I’m an investor in buy smaller companies to help build out their product road map.  I’m explicitly not a fan of rollups – I’ve had my share of investments in rollups that didn’t work.  But I love targeted acquisitions that build out specific capabilities on an established company’s roadmap or add key people to the team.  If you are looking for recent examples of this in my world, two others are NewsGator’s acquisition of Tomoye or Zynga’s acquisition of Serious Business. 

Both companies have detailed blog posts about the deal – Welcome AgileZen! and We’ve joined Rally Software.  If you are a company operating in one of our themes, don’t ever hesitate to reach out to me if you think you might fit with a company we’ve already invested in – you never know where the conversation might lead.

And congrats to both Rally and AgileZen – I’m excited for you guys.