Loopfuse

Executive moves: Matt Quinlan joins Loopfuse

For a variety of reasons, Matt Quinlan, formerly of JBoss, left Appcelerator some months ago. I was glad to hear this week that "Quin," as he's called, has landed at Loopfuse, an open-source marketing automation company. Quin is one of the brightest lights from JBoss, and will be a credit to Loopfuse as its vice president of Sales and Marketing.

It's a great coup for Loopfuse and, more importantly, a return to the open-source industry by a highly respected JBoss veteran. Welcome back, Quin.

Disclosure: I am an advisor to Loopfuse.

One problem with the cloud: Obsolescence of applications

ReadWriteWeb lists 10 of its favorite Web applications that have disappeared from the Web. In so doing, it calls out a problem with cloud-based applications that lack an open-source license: once they're gone, they're really gone.

I've mentioned before enterprises that have desperately tried to get their proprietary vendors to open-source their code, only to see the vendors go bankrupt and take their code with them. No, having source code access wouldn't necessarily guarantee an easy future for such customers, but not having the source code ensures that there is no future for the product and … Read more

The best new open-source companies

There were a slew of new open-source companies launched (or still getting first looks) at last week's Open Source Business Conference. A few sites (Socialized Software and ZDNet, to name two of them)have been pointing to some of the more promising ones.

Here are a few to watch:

Acquia - Drupal-based social/web content management company Ringside Networks - Social networking platform/application server Loopfuse - Marketing automation (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Loopfuse) Projity - Microsoft Project competitor

And more. Check out the sites above to see who else caught the eye. Interestingly, JBoss executives sit … Read more

Is this what panic looks like? Eloqua's fixation with Loopfuse

I'm biased on this one, but I had to laugh when I read the Loopfuse blog today. It turns out that Eloqua, Loopfuse's most direct, proprietary competition, is totally unconcerned by Loopfuse as a competitor.

The problem, unfortunately, is that the data says otherwise:… Read more

The open source download canard

I'm not sure why we continue to persist in talking about downloads, but I'm with Stephe on this one: downloads are not the best measure of success in open source. In fact, they're often not even a remote predictor of success (i.e., sales). Having them, as Stephen O' Grady notes, is much better than not having them, but it would be erroneous in the extreme to assume a company with 100,000 downloads per month necessarily has a bigger market opportunity than a company with 20,000 downloads per month.

The 451 Group's Matt Aslett points out that marketing automation software like Loopfuse can help to supercharge an open-source company's conversion rate. Same number of leads in, many more conversions (sales) out. I agree with that. Aslett writes:

Of course, the statistic [in Loopfuse's results] that will have jumped out for many people is the drop from a 40X increase in qualified leads to an 8X increase in engagements. The theory that leads are not enough in open source software has also been well documented. The ability to turn those qualified leads into paying customers remains a missing piece of the commercial open source puzzle.… Read more

"Stealth mode" Loopfuse to be unveiled

Loopfuse has been actively selling to customers and blogging about its successes for nearly a year now. Yet such is the industry - where open source has become so mainstream that we often neglect the rise of truly innovative software - that it's not surprising that IDG missed Loopfuse until now. We forgive you, IDG! :-)

Regardless, if you haven't heard of Loopfuse or started using its (or a competitor's) marketing automation software, you need to correct this fault. Immediately. Here's what it does:

Lead generation products track the activities of potential customers on a company's Web site and use factors like their job titles and activities on the site to assign "lead scores," which help salespeople to target their efforts. The products work in tandem with customer relationship management software.

This is, in part, what open-source Loopfuse (as well as proprietary products like Eloqua) does. It's more than this, though this would be enough.… Read more

First take on Loopfuse Marketing and Sales Automation (Verdict: Fantastic)

We just launched our new website and started using Loopfuse for analytics and marketing automation and I can't believe how cool the product is. The dashboards and tracking mechanisms are like crack for marketing people--we just can't look away.

LoopFuse makes marketing automation simple, enabling you to generate demand and identify qualified leads so you can focus on the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, revenue growth, and overall business success.

You can get your Loopfuse-as-a-Service, or as an open source product. I can't believe these guys haven't been acquired already.

Building websites still sucks

My first "real"-ish job was at a web design shop in NYC as a web monkey. Back in those days you did all your own code and all the photoshop etc. (and we walked uphill both ways to the office.) None of this 5 man team to make one little website nonsense and no fancy-pants Dreamweaver to write your code for you.

As time passed, more tools and CMS systems have become available which in theory should make web development and maintenance easier. Languages like PHP have made templating much easier, but in the end someone still … Read more

Web strategy for open-source businesses (Learning from JBoss)

Talk with John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM, and he'll tell you that his website is one of his most valuable business tools. It's often the beginning point to a customer relationship and is also often the source of a deal closing. Few understand web strategy as well as SugarCRM.

JBoss might well be among that few. I was reading through an internal presentation from JBoss and continually find myself impressed by how well Marc, Rob, Bob, and the others grok'd the importance of the web to their business. JBoss knew who was hitting its website, what they were doing there, and how to nurture that initial interest into a sale.

Take a look at the slide to the right. IBM is the master of selling to the CIO and pushing its technology down into an enterprise. Open source generally works in the opposite fashion. You start with the developer/architect and "bottom-up" adoption of technology until it's pervasive enough to catch the CIO's attention...and her wallet.… Read more