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.
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
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
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.
(Credit:
JBoss/Red Hat)
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- prev
- 1
- next
