Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category

eXo Expands Collaboration With Red Hat on JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

eXo powers newly announced CMS from Red Hat; further extends this forthcoming product with add-on modules to bring social, collaboration and knowledge management capabilities

BOSTON, June 24 - RED HAT SUMMIT – eXo (http://exoplatform.com) today announced the introduction of eXo Add-on Modules for JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Site Publisher, a new content management system (CMS) powered by eXo that Red Hat previewed to customers today and will release later this year. With the eXo Add-on Modules, JBoss Site Publisher customers will be able mix and match their content with applications and publish across not only websites but also enterprise social networks, activity streams, instant messaging and forums.

eXo Add-on Modules for JBoss —  eXo Social, eXo Collaboration and eXo Knowledge — are planned to be released concurrent with JBoss Site Publisher’s general availability. The modules will be based on eXo community projects which are available today as downloads bundled with GateIn 3.0 and Tomcat 6.0 to run out of the box.

News Highlights

  • Red Hat and eXo partnered in 2009 to collaborate on  GateIn, the next generation portal framework created by the merger of the eXo Portal and JBoss Portal. GateIn is the underlying technology of  JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0, which is generally available today.
  • Site Publisher builds on this partnership with an add-on component based on eXo WCM.
  • eXo Add-on Modules for Site Publisher includes:
    — eXo Social: Turn any portal directory into a social network; create individual, team and application profiles; follow activity streams for individuals, teams and applications.
    — eXo Collaboration: Add integrated chat, rich email client and calendaring to better collaborate across teams.
    — eXo Knowledge: Build forums and FAQ sites to facilitate better knowledge sharing and service across the company, with partners or with customers.
    — Extensions for document management and workflow.

  • eXo Add-on Modules for Site Publisher are tested and packaged commercial offerings based on eXo open source projects.

Supporting Quotes

Jason Andersen, Red Hat senior product manager for portals: “Red Hat is pleased to expand our collaboration with eXo to deliver JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Site Publisher later this year. The breadth and availability of eXo’s modules enabling social networks, collaboration and knowledge management will further enhance Site Publisher for our customers and provide the value they expect from an integrated platform for building rich, content-driven applications.”

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO, eXo: “Web content management is one of the most mature open source markets, so it’s a huge validation for eXo to be chosen by Red Hat to power JBoss Site Publisher. Being lightweight and flexible has been a core philosophy behind eXo’s architecture, enabling us to extend JBoss Site Publisher with a great number of applications for their platform.”

Online Resources

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Posted in ECM, GateIn, Strategy, application, business, exo, marketing, open source, partnership, portal, press, social, wcm | No Comments »

eXo Funding – Seen on the Web

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Nothing generates press quite like announcing that you’ve been given $6 million in VC funding!  We were excited to see so much support for eXo in the form of articles and blogs around the US and Europe.  Here’s a quick recap of some of the coverage:

In the US:

CMS Wire, “eXo Raises US$ 6 Million to Boost U.S. Operations” PE Hub, “eXo Raises $6 Million”
The 451 Group, “Open source portal play eXo Platform takes $6m series A” VentureBeat, “eXo Raises $6 Million to build Java applications”
Silicon Tap, “eXo Snags $6M More” Silicon Valley Wire/Bay Area Techwire, “San Francisco’s eXo raises 6 million to expand US expansion”
Sacha Labourey, “eXo Platform raises 6m USD” CTO Edge, “Melding Transactions with Collaboration”

From France and Europe:

TechCrunch Europe, “eXo raises €4 million for US expansion” Silicon, “eXo Platform lève 4 millions d’euros”
Le Monde Informatique, “L’éditeur français Exo Platform lève quatre millions d’euros” Le Mag IT, “Le Français eXo Platform lève 4 M€ pour développer son partenariat avec Red Hat”
Le Journal Du Net, “eXo Platform lève 4 millions d’euros”

The original press release can be read here: “eXo Accelerates U.S. Operations with $6 Million Series A Financing”.

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Never Say Never: VC Money, and What It Means for eXo

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

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.

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eXoer Arnaud Héritier released his book on Apache Maven

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Arnaud Héritier, Manager of the Development Tools and Practices at eXo Platform, just released his book on Apache Maven co-written with Nicolas De loof, Java Architect in a renown french IT company and member of the Maven development team since 2007.

After 10 years developping Java applications and being an active member of the Executive Comitee of Maven, Arnaud just published a book on which he worked more than one year and where he explains the benefits of using Maven in any kind of organization, from the start-up to the large company, through his great experiences of the tool.

Arnaud and Nicolas decided to contribute to the french maven community through this book that aim both newbies and advanced users of the Maven tool. This book, in french language, covers various subjects:
- The project descriptor (POM),
- Dependencies and libraries (Repository management,…),
- Project construction settings (alternative language use like Groovy, …),
- Unit tests, integration tests (dbunit,…), interface tests (selenium), functional tests (fitnesse), performance tests (jmeter), …
- JEE projects,
- Integration to the development environments (eclipse, netbeans, intellij),
- Automatisation of the delivery process,
- Quality management (pmd, checkstyle, findbugs, sonar, …),
- Writting Maven plugins,
- Assembly,
- Projects models (archetypes),
- The future of Maven

2337-ref Apache Maven.indd

The official description for french readers:

Editeur : Pearson France
Collection : Référence
Auteurs : Nicolas De loof, Arnaud Héritier
Niveau : Tous niveaux
Catégorie : Programmation
Prix : 32 €
Référence : 978-2-7440-2337-8
Date de parution : 20 Novembre 2009

Maven, l’outil open-source de gestion et d’automatisation de développement Java, a le vent en poupe. Les raisons : il systématise, rationalise et simplifie le développement collaboratif de projets Java, faisant gagner aux entreprises comme aux développeurs du temps et de l’argent !

Les auteurs, membres de l’équipe de développement Maven, aidés par toute la communauté francophone, ont imaginé de présenter Maven 2 sous un angle original et didactique, à travers un projet fictif, inspiré de leurs expériences sur le terrain, dont ils détaillent toutes les phases successives. Ce projet évolue au fil des besoins et de la contribution de développeurs aux profils différents, vous familiarisant avec les concepts fondamentaux de Maven et leur mise en œuvre pratique, mais aussi avec les fonctionnalités plus avancées. Vous profitez également des recommandations et bonnes pratiques pour optimiser votre utilisation de Maven.

Vous découvrez ainsi de manière ludique et grâce à des exemples concrets le potentiel de Maven, et tous les avantages qu’il peut apporter à vos propres projets.

Sommaire :
- Introduction
- Au-delà de java.lang
- Un peu plus que compiler
- Mettre en place des tests unitaires
- Mettre en place des tests d’intégration
- Gestion avancée des dépendances
- Quand le projet devient trop lourd
- Maven et JEE
- Maven et les IDE
- Le jour J : la livraison
- Utiliser un outil non supporté
- L’assurance qualité
- Respecter un format de distribution
- Un nouveau projet démarre
- Avons-nous fait le bon choix
- Nos recommandations
- Épilogue
- Lexique

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Posted in Strategy, development, exo, press, technical | No Comments »

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.

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