Archive for October, 2009

« Older Entries

View from the valley

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Earlier this month, eXo finally opened our first U.S. office. This was a long time coming. As much as we have wanted to be in the North American market, we always knew we had to do it right. That means with the right partner and the right people to help open the right doors for us. For me, it also meant a personal commitment to move to the U.S. to lay the groundwork for eXo’s success.

After being in Silicon Valley for a month, I have definitely noticed that things move at a much faster pace here. The network is huge, and thanks to our advisors and professional peers, I’ve been able to tap into this network already. Every week, there’s some conference or event that’s worth checking out. And it is a very active technology community here. On the one hand, I expected this because the Valley is still very much at the center of the global tech industry. On the other hand, I did not realize to what extent all this meant.

One of the pick ups we’ve seen already is in sales opportunities. Just having a presence in the U.S. has enabled eXo to enter accounts where we had been excluded in past. And this came about before we have fully automated marketing and lead generation on our site. This a new level of marketing investment that eXo has not had to consider before, but a crucial step as we adjust from an indirect sales model in Europe to a direct sales model in the North American market. Until now, eXo has sold mostly through ISVs and systems integrator partners such as Bull, Cross Systems, and Business Decision. In Europe, very few significant IT initiatives are undertaken without an SI. It’s a different game in the U.S., and I find myself constantly thinking about repeatable sales processes.

We are also modifying how we productize eXo software. In the European market, we will continue to offer Community Supported Editions of the eXo stack to our public sector customers. Here, we are moving to an Enterprise Edition distribution similar to Red Hat’s RHEL/fedora model. As we refine this packaging, you can expect to hear more about this in the near future.

One last thing we are seeing is a shift in how we sell our offerings. In Europe, open source software was never about cost but rather about access to the source code. Here, we’re anticipating cost to be an important factor in the sales pitch — not so much that we’re cheaper but rather that we provide the best value with our software.

At eXo, we’ve built a low-cost distributed agile team with a huge R&D force. We drive much of the R&D from our centers in Vietnam and The Ukraine; sales operations from Tunisia; and  packaging and conceptualization from France. With sales and marketing strategy now driven out of our U.S. center, we have put in place the final building block to accelerate and sustain eXo’s growth. I am personally very excited to be leading this effort from San Francisco!

On a side note, I will be speaking on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference panel about “Open Social in the Enterprise” next Wednesday, November 4th at 10:15 a.m. If you’ll be in attendance, I hope you will consider sitting in on this. Otherwise, send me an email or tweet if you’d like to meet up.

Share this blog post with :
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [dzone] [Facebook] [Furl] [Ma.gnolia] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

Tags: , ,
Posted in Industry Trends | No Comments »

[video] JSF 1.0 and 2.0 Portlet Bridge in GateIn

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Thanks Wesley Hales for this great tutorial

Share this blog post with :
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [dzone] [Facebook] [Furl] [Ma.gnolia] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

Posted in Tech Talk, Use Cases | No Comments »

[video] GateIn beta 2, what’s new

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Here is the new GateIn beta 2 video which includes:

  • the new layout management for groups and dashboards
  • the new skins management with hot deployment support
  • a lot of UI enhancements
  • an introduction to the great new packaging to easily extend GateIn

GateIn 3.0 beta 2, what is new? from Benjamin Mestrallet on Vimeo.

You can download GateIn Beta 2 or watch the first video

Share this blog post with :
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [dzone] [Facebook] [Furl] [Ma.gnolia] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

Posted in Company News, Use Cases | No Comments »

Where is the portal in SharePoint 2010?

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

This week, Microsoft is revealing more details about SharePoint 2010 at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. What I find most interesting from news articles and opinions so far is how closely aligned Microsoft’s vision for SharePoint 2010 is to what eXo has been working towards — an application container with services.

As you know, eXo is best known for our early work in portal technologies and standards. The eXo Portal was built in 2003 with the U.S. Department of Defense to aggregate applications for the US Joint Force Command operations. Our decision earlier this summer to merge this portal with the JBoss Portal couldn’t have come at a better time. Forget everything you think you know about “portals.” The nature of portals has changed, and with GateIn (eXo + JBoss), we’re seeing portal’s transformation from an aggregator of external applications to a platform for building and delivering services that add value to the user organisation.

So it’s therefore no surprise that Microsoft is no longer talking about “portal” in its messages about SharePoint 2010, but rather “sites.” This may seem a small change, but one that points to a future when companies will not want to build a website without a platform on which horizontal services can be added easily and managed from a single point. In fact, our customers are already asking for this. They want to be able to manage this platform (and the resulting cost savings, efficiencies, and productivity) from the IT department — not integrate a variety of multi-vendor applications for web content management, workflow, blogs, wikis and social networks used by different teams across the company.

We believe strongly that GateIn will be this platform of the future, today. And because it is open and based on standards, GateIn could become a standard itself. We’ve shown you some early demos and screenshots of GateIn. Today, we released the second beta. Our next step is to get to a GA release, so people can start building valuable services on GateIn.

Which services will be most important for your business? Drop me a note, or send me a tweet @benjmestrallet.

Share this blog post with :
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [dzone] [Facebook] [Furl] [Ma.gnolia] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

Posted in Industry Trends | No Comments »

Ippon Technologies introduce eXo Platform at its Open Source Portals conference

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Last week, Ippon technologies, French IT Company specialized in architectures and expert of the J2EE platform, presented a conference about the Open Source Portal market.

356_ippon_logo

The conference room was full and it proved an increasing interest for Open Source Portals as decision makers are more and more looking for alternatives to proprietary software.

In the first part of the conference, Bertrand Pinel, Technical Manager at Ippon, explained some technological aspects of the enterprise Portals to make J2EE portals compliant with each other, as the JSR 168 and 286 for the portlet specifications and the JSR 170 for the Java Content Repository.

Then, Ippon Technologies presented its expertise on the eXo stack through the work done for one of its customers: Globecast, which is a subsidiary of France Telecom. Attendees have been able to understand how these tools contributed to improve the time needed to display new information and features to the users and how the portal are integrated to Information Systems already running in the companies.

Through these customer feedbacks, some interesting findings came up:

  • Open Source portals are gaining interests and companies are more and more choosing the open source way instead of heavy and locked solutions (like Oracle, IBM and SharePoint);
  • Nowadays, the tools are mature enough in terms of features and interfaces to produce real websites with modern designs;
  • Some big companies are using the eXo Community edition for critical missions;
  • Most clients are using Tomcat as a server for their portal;

sb_top.jpg (JPEG Image, 290x241 pixels)

Nicolas Martignole, a well known IT expert, author of the blog “Le Touilleur Express“, attended the event and came back with some interesting comments. Here is an extract of his point of view:

“From what I heard, eXo Platform have real products, with Product Managers, like Patrice Lamarque, eXo CS and KS PM. This is interesting because this product-oriented approach is more opened. Where LifeRay is the Office suite, eXo seems to provide different layers that correspond to your needs.”

“And finally, isn’t the eXo modules oriented approach more interesting that the all-or-nothing approach of LifeRay? I write on my notebook… Modules=flexibility=eXo.”

“I then attended the presentation of an Intranet project built with eXo Portal and eXo WCM for Globecast, subsidiary of France Telecom and customer of Ippon Technologies. The Intranet “websites factory” is a content oriented project that aims to ease the communication inside the company and between the different departments. The portal also provides the ability to mash up contents, enables all the teams to work together and to build contents.”

“We also had the opportunity to discuss with Patrice Lamarque, Product Manager at eXo. The new engine version is called GateIn and comes from the partnership between eXo and JBoss. It is a promising product and I think we will have a brand new Portal generation in few months.”

More resources:

Share this blog post with :
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [dzone] [Facebook] [Furl] [Ma.gnolia] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Events | No Comments »

« Older Entries