Version control perennial Perforce and cloud-based Agile development player Assembla have teamed to announce an on-demand version of Perforce Software Version Management integrated with team tools from Assembla.

Here's the concept: enterprise-grade versioning with enterprise-level collaboration and integrated team workflow tools… free of charge, gratis, no cost at all — for up to 20 users.

Gartner's Thomas Murphy is enthused about this new development, saying that we can now expect "a continued growth" in solutions that are delivered via cloud infrastructure and integrated with existing development assets and repositories.

With Assembla-hosted Perforce on Demand, developers can reportedly get a new depot in seconds, with triple-redundant backup. They can immediately invite other colleagues by email and there is no need to wait for an administrator to authorize or configure repositories or users.

An activity stream shows code commits and user activities — and code review and social coding features help distributed teams test, review, and merge code into frequent releases.

"Assembla's track record of hosting repositories and providing task management and collaboration tools makes it a good fit to deliver Perforce version management," said Randy DeFauw, technical marketing manager for Perforce Software. "With Perforce and Assembla, small teams get powerful version management tightly integrated with an Agile planning board and activity streams."

"[In addition to this news…] we are very excited to offer new capabilities that go beyond our Subversion and Git offerings," said Andy Singleton, CEO and Founder of Assembla. "We think our customers will be impressed with Perforce's version control and merge capabilities, and with its visual 'streams' that can automatically merge, build, and test code from various contributors."