Customer win round-up (EnterpriseDB and Liferay)

In two separate pieces of news today, EnterpriseDB was selected by FTD to replace Oracle, and Liferay was selected to replace Novell's exteNd portal offering. Both demonstrate the continue value that open source provides (yes, even to EnterpriseDB).

Interestingly, both EnterpriseDB and Liferay have Apache-style licenses at their core. The difference, of course, is what they sell on top: for EnterpriseDB, they add some closed software; for Liferay, they add support. What's exactly the same is dramatic cost savings and improved performance by moving away from 100% proprietary offerings:

On EnterpriseDB's win with FTD, and over Oracle (improving system performance by 400% while dropping the cost by 83%)...

EnterpriseDB, the Oracle-compatible database company, announced today that FTD, one of the largest floral companies in the world, has selected EnterpriseDB to power the external reporting for FTD's ARGO shipping administration system. A major factor in FTD's selection was EnterpriseDB's ability to run applications written for Oracle, which reduces migration costs dramatically. ARGO's reporting subsystem originally ran on the Oracle database that supports FTD's order-processing system, and was moved to EnterpriseDB with only minor changes. The EnterpriseDB solution cost FTD only one-sixth of the price of a comparably configured Oracle solution. It also enabled FTD to avoid costly hardware upgrades, driving additional cost savings at the company.

On the Liferay win with Colorado's Department of Human Services...

Colorado's Department of Human Services is one of the hardest-working agencies in the state. The second-largest agency in Colorado, it oversees 64 county departments of social and human services, ranging from the state's public mental health system to veterans' nursing homes and thousands of community-based service providers. County-administered programs, such as public assistance and child welfare services, are also supervised by the department.

CDHS has three large systems to administer and support: the County Financial Management System; Trails, a child welfare system; and the Colorado Benefits Management System. The systems provide an array of services, including food and child welfare assistance and disbursement of funds....

CDHS decided on the Liferay open-source portal because "it seemed to be the most mature product, and it had a very active open-source community," Cash said. The open-source community was one of the keys to the department's decision. "We wanted to benefit from an open-source community, and we also wanted to contribute back to it," Cash said.

Those CDHS fools! Didn't they know that nobody cares about source code??? ;-) Those of you who know the Liferay people will know that this couldn't have happened to a better group. Alfresco has been joined with Liferay for a range of deals - these guys get into some fantastic customers. Great work!