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Friday, July 24, 2009
Drupal creator's startup, other firm, seek lead roles in open source
By Galen Moore
MHT's Galen Moore: Two differing web-based news business models
MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: How social networking is changing business
If two companies launched here have their way, Massachusetts will become a double epicenter for open-source software. Two startups with Massachusetts roots are hoping to become the next Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) of their respective open-source communities, and venture dollars are chasing their efforts.
Acquia Inc. has closed $8 million in new financing — a story first reported on www.masshightech.com earlier this week, bringing to $15 million the total in funds raised by the company founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert.
Andover-based Acquia hopes to become Drupal’s anchor, proving the credibility and scalability of the open-source web content management platform in enterprise applications.
Founded in Newton, Lucid Imagination Inc. hopes to do the same thing for the Solr enterprise search server, an open-source project based on the Apache Lucene search library.
Earlier this year, Lucid announced that CIA investing arm In-Q-Tel invested an undisclosed amount as a strategic investor and customer, adding to the $6 million Lucid received last September in Series A funding from Granite Ventures and Walden International.
As Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat celebrated its ascendance to the S&P 500 this week, open-source evangelists like Buytaert and Lucid founder Marc Krellenstein said it’s only the beginning for open-source software in the enterprise market. The global open-source software services is predicted to reach $3.9 billion for 2009 and double in the next five years, according to IDC of Framingham.
“There’s a huge amount yet to grow,” Krellenstein said, noting that companies like his are critical to addressing enterprise concerns.
In the open-source model, companies have free access to source code, paying only for services to develop applications and maintain them. They save on license fees and benefit from the model’s flexibility and the large community of developers that work on open-source projects, say evangelists.
However, in order to use Solr and Lucene for the search functions built into applications like e-commerce, discovery, compliance and intranet, large enterprises need guaranteed access and formal arrangements only a large anchor company can provide, Krellenstein said.
Buytaert started Acquia in 2007 for the same reasons. “In order to allow Drupal to reach its full potential, the Drupal community needed a company like Acquia,” he said.
Buytaert founded the open-source platform Drupal as a college message board while a student in his native Belgium in 1999. When he made the source code publicly available, he thought maybe 10 people would use it at most. Now, he counts 2,000 Drupal professional services companies building websites on the platform.
A watershed moment came in the 2004 presidential campaign, when candidate Howard Dean broke new ground in online fundraising with a Drupal-based site.
Drupal has done well by being ahead of social media trends in computing, said Doug Levin, co-founder and former CEO of the Waltham-based open-source software company Black Duck Software Inc. However, open-source platform Alfresco, which provides enterprise content management — managing the storage of data and documents within the enterprise — may have a bigger opportunity with large organizations, he said.
“I would say the open-source CMS space is a very competitive space and has been for many years,” he said.
But Buytaert believes the opportunity is large for website content management and Drupal. He pointed to adoption by companies like Sony, NBC and Disney — and the federal government’s Recovery.gov site.
Acquia’s potential for growth depends on the growth of its community, Buytaert said. For now, the future looks bright. “(Drupal has) a large culture,” he said. “We only need to convert a fraction of the users.”
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