Announcing the Hippo Enterprise Edition

Last week we made a great addition to our offering: The Enterprise Edition as part of our Hippo Enterprise Subscription. One of the great advantages is that we are now able to offer features and benefits that our increasingly demanding (Fortune 100) customers need.

How does this relate to our open source background and commitment? In the past I wrote some long blog posts on open source business models. My take is this. Open source is the robust platform for innovation and quality. The standards based approach that comes with open source benefits everyone: developers, customers, and the community itself. For a community and open source platform to be viable you need an open development approach and this is the reason we have and always will be committed to development in the Apache Software Foundation. Just recently we helped to create a great new lightweight personalization, portal and gadget platform Apache Rave, that now has considerable traction and was mentioned as Open Source Rookie of the year by BlackDuck.

What hasn’t changed either is that we are striving to help our customers to create the best online experiences. We are constantly experimenting, innovating, but also working on tedious invisible core stuff for stability and compatibility. What we see today is that companies are more familiar with open source in general and see it as less risky, which is a good thing! In the conversations we had with our customers they told us they really liked the Hippo CMS platform and wanted additional value on top of our subscription model. This made us think hard about how software development, innovation and open source actually work together.

Open Source is the platform for innovation, not the innovation itself

We think standards. And when there’s no standard yet, we help create them. Just as we are doing now as initiator, together with Adobe/Day, of the upcoming OASIS WEMI standard, about which our CTO Arje Cahn wrote in his blog. But naturally standards lag somewhat behind on innovation, they make the next level of innovation happen. This also holds true for the open source projects implementing those standards. Companies like Google, Amazon, IBM innovate on top of open source and in the same time give back to open source to ensure the platform grows and remains viable. We have reached the point where Hippo CMS is a viable platform for innovation for many companies. The Hippo CMS community edition is suitable for highly demanding web environments and you can be sure it’s in our best interest to keep it that way.

With the Enterprise Edition we can provide our most demanding customers with cutting edge innovation and tools for enterprise deployments. They like that their money buys them extra features, but that at the same time they like that they are not locked in on a closed source platform. Because vendor independence is worth a lot to them and to us. The Hippo CMS community edition is the core of the Enterprise Edition and to their solution, with no code differences. It will always be open source and with the majority of the code firmly embedded in Apache projects and Apache licensed, it is continuously improved by us and other contributors in the Apache community.

From the feedback we are getting, we now struck the right balance in our search for the best of both worlds: the robustness of open source and the advantages of a professional company. I hope you agree.

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