Prabhat Jha, one of the JBoss developers collaborating with the eXo team to build GateIn, shows how to add a tic-tac-toe gadget to GateIn on his blog today. Here’s how he describes it:
If you thought Portal was only about serious stuffs such as content aggregation, integration of different applications, out of box personalization and natural front end to SOA etc then think again. Using GateIn’s gadgets, you already could import different cool gadgets say from Google to your dashboard and page. Now you can tic-tac-toe as well. Here is a screen shot from GateIn Portal for you i-dont-believe-until-i-see kinds.
I would like to thank all the people that have sent us email or tweets to congratulate us about our fund-raising, we do appreciate all the support.
The more I think about it though, raising money is not an achievement in and of itself; it is just another step forward, allowing us to grow faster. This important milestone is simply the result of hard work, passion and perseverance. Getting the financial investment today is great validation of our vision, but it is not the reason that our product has grown to be so great and that our team is so talented. In fact, I am not “happy” and thinking it’s time to relax or celebrate. I’m satisfied by the work done, that the negotiation went very well for us and our existing shareholders, and that the long administrative process is over. But now it’s time to move on, and work even harder.
It has been 6 years and 4 months since I founded eXo. I was finishing my studies when some engineers from the US Department of Defense saw our code on SourceForge and asked us to provide services; we were the first guys to have a JSR 168 implementation. That consulting gig was a lot of money, and even more when they purchased the support. In other words, the DoD was our angel investor, but with no equity! Yet none of us considered walking away and using our profit to buy something nice for ourselves – we reinvested it all. And the culture of eXo is still rooted in that today.
Having a single product and a single customer is not what you should plan, but that is how we started. Having 95% of your total staff being engineers is not common either, but that is why eXo is different. We have grown on our strengths with only one goal: customer satisfaction. We built out our features and product line because our customers demanded it, never because it was trendy. We did not want to do direct sales, hence we relied on partners. We did not want to be “only” a consulting company, hence we relied on integrators. We have always tried to focus on our core competencies, and this has proven to be a good strategy.
Today, we have a unique integrated platform that has no competitor in the Java world, being distributed by a large number of partners, including Red Hat. Again, this is only the result of hard work and perseverance, a set of values every eXo employee shares. I will make sure that raising money won’t change that. We are not done yet.
We have spent 6 years building a profitable bootstrapped company that now employs more than 120 employees in 5 countries. I never planned to raise money; in fact I was against it (note to my psychoanalyst, having a father that used to be a VC is not the reason). I moved myself and my family to the US to make sure that the new deal we had with Red Hat would be a success. I realized there that what we did was big, that the demand is high, that we needed to move fast.
Thanks to Sacha Labourey, I was introduced to Bob Bickel (new eXo Chairman of the board of directors). With their help, we adapted the messaging for the US market – and we realized, we’re onto something huge. This is an opportunity that we can’t afford to miss. We have to execute and we have to do it quickly.
That’s when we decided to raise money. And frankly getting a term sheet was not difficult, and we had a choice between VC’s in the US and in Europe. We decided to raise in Europe for a couple of simple reasons: that’s where we have our roots and where we have known the VCs for some time, and of course the strength of the Euro. Although money is only a part of the equation, trust is another. We are happy to have a great deal from people we like to work with.
My parents always told me that “you don’t need to tell people you are the best, just be the best and they will know.” I think this company takes that work ethic to heart. We don’t stop to give ourselves praise or parade our accomplishments, we just keep doing what we do best – working hard.
Even though we had some big news today about our VC funding, it’s business-as-usual here at eXo. We’re busy getting ready for the launch of the open source portal framework, GateIn, that we’ve been collaborating on with Red Hat. Julien Viet, the lead developer for eXo’s effort on GateIn, will be giving an “under the hood” look at some of GateIn’s core technology in a one-hour webinar on 24 March.
The webinar, called “Technical Deep Dive: Understanding Advanced Persistence and Querying with Chromattic and CRaSH, Tools in the GateIn Portal Framework” will take place on 24 March, 2010, at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm GMT. The key concepts of Chromattic & CRaSH will be presented, as Julien walks through the development of a simple Chromattic application in real-time. This sample application will be made available to the attendees so they can use the sample code as a starting point. This advanced technical session will show:
How to integrate Chromattic with a modern IDE using a Maven-based build
How to deploy and connect to a CRaSH shell
How to create a custom CRaSH command
Several advanced features of Chromattic will be highlighted, to demonstrate the power of the framework
Attendees will also have the opportunity to interact with and ask questions of Julien and other eXo core developers.
Names former GM HP Middleware and JBoss VP of Strategy to chairman of new board
San Francisco, Calif. (Mar. 8, 2010) – eXo, provider of Java middleware for cloud services, today announced an infusion of $6 million in venture capital financing from Auriga Partners and XAnge Capital. With the new funds, eXo accelerates its U.S. operations, including ramping up marketing and sales.
In addition, eXo has created a new Board of Directors, naming Bob Bickel as Chairman. Bickel is a 25-year software industry veteran with experience building profitable, high growth enterprise software companies, including Bluestone Software (acquired by HP) and JBoss (acquired by Red Hat). He also served on the board and as an advisor to Hyperic and SpringSource respectively before their acquisition by VMware. Philippe Granger, partner at Auriga Partners, and Nicolas Rose, partner at XAnge Capital, will also be joining the new board on behalf of eXo’s new investors.
“At eXo, we see a huge opportunity to bring higher level services that can extend installed enterprise Java applications with consumer web features such as collaboration, social and content management,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo. “We now have the capital and collective business guidance of our new board to execute on this opportunity and take eXo to the next stage of growth.”
With an existing footprint in French-speaking markets, eXo opened its first U.S. office last October following a partnership with Red Hat. The new financing will help fuel sales and marketing in North America, including a strong emphasis on forging partnerships with OEMs, ISVs, SIs, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers that want to enhance their offerings with eXo’s out-of-the-box services for Collaboration, Content Management and Social Computing.
Bickel commented: “Benjamin and his team have done a great job of getting eXo to this unique position in the market where it can be the unifying, modernizing framework and user experience platform that Java needs to remain relevant in today’s web-driven world. I look forward to working with the eXo team to enhance this position in the months and years ahead.”
Auriga Partners is an independent venture capital firm based on Paris with more than 180 million euros under management. The firm provides seed or early stage investment in information technologies and life sciences in Europe, North America and Israel.
Founded by the French public postal operator Group La Poste, XAnge Capital invests primarily in businesses whose activities are related to La Poste’s core businesses and present potential for synergies and partnerships (e.g., electronic exchanges and e-commerce, transaction security, CRM and direct marketing, document intelligence and logistics).
About eXo
eXo offers the next generation of Java middleware designed for the new era of cloud-based services. The eXo Platform makes Java websites and applications faster to build and easier to deploy, and offers modern features such as content, collaboration, social and knowledge on a services-based architecture. The company has established technology leadership and proven value by their large European installed base and strategic partnerships with Red Hat, Capgemini, Atos Origin and Bull. eXo maintains U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, Calif. with global headquarters in France and offices in Tunisia, Ukraine and Vietnam. For news and updates from eXo, follow @exoplatform on Twitter.
Last week we hosted a webinar to introduce the xCMIS, the new CMIS implementation from eXo. During the webinar, Jeremi showed a live demo of xCMIS accessing and editing Zoho docs. He has already converted this into a helpful step-by-step guide with screenshots. But, if you missed the webinar, you can now check out a video of the demo as well:
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