Open Atrium and Managing News Find a New Home with Phase2
Today we are announcing the purchase of Open Atrium, a team collaboration tool and Managing News, a pluggable news and data aggregator both developed on Drupal. This represents the first step in a new collaboration and a far-reaching partnership with our friends at Development Seed who created these distributions and with whom we share a love of developing great open source products.
This move is unprecedented in the Drupal community and we are excited to venture into new territory as Drupal continues to grow into enterprise markets. Development Seed has been an amazing contributor to the Drupal community with an unparalleled enthusiasm for the research and development of new applications and solutions in Drupal, including these two innovative products and many excellent framework contributions. We are proud to continue the development and support of their work, and to continue providing community contributions to the underlying components of these solutions.
Our decision to acquire these products was a very natural one for us, based in part on prior collaborations with Development Seed and our experience deploying these products for our own clients. We know there is great demand for additional offerings around Open Atrium. It provides an open source, configurable and extendable alternative to proprietary tools like Basecamp, and Atrium's vibrant and thriving community is proof of its value. We know Open Atrium technically, because we use the same modules and components for our own distributions and one of our development team just released book Building Drupal Intranets with Open Atrium. Managing News has common roots with our Tattler product and provides a natural complement for our online publishing clients using OpenPublish.
Going forward, this move is great for the Drupal community. It helps to validate the business viability of open source and shows a maturing of business models. Development Seed is focusing its efforts on developing new products – which is their strength, and we’re focusing our efforts on taking a suite of Drupal products to market – which is our strength. It enables us to craft a wide range of expandable platforms for the markets and customers we serve. This partnership also allows Development Seed to push forward faster with their groundbreaking mapping work and node.js. So expect more great things from them.
The ecosystem around Drupal is evolving. From services to packaged distributions to full blown products, the Drupal community has stepped outside of an open source CMS platform to create and deliver real economic value and a marketplace around Drupal. Phase2 has been one of the earliest and most dedicated champions of developing distributions of Drupal. We understand the significant time and resources it takes not only to develop and maintain a high quality distribution, but also to effectively take it to market.
We are very excited to share other plans soon and will be updating you shortly with more information on our plans including a roadmap for Open Atrium, upgrading to Drupal 7 and other integrated products and services we can provide. Stay tuned for more updates in coming days.
Comments
Drupal growing more mature
Drupal is becoming more and more mature. Looking at the ecosystem surrounding other open source projects like eg. Eclipse, Linux I'm very much excited to see a similar growth happening in the Drupal Ecosphere. Al tough there might be some skepticism around commercializing Drupal (see Drupal Appstore http://bxl2011.drupaldays.org/node/319), i honestely believe that this movement is a GOOD thing for drupal, and Drupal it's community and the contributors will benefit from this movement.
Congratulations to both companies !
Fantastic
More collaboration is always good, and I'll love to see Open Atrium and Managing News continue to evolve.
Here's hoping OpenAtrium sets its sights on Trac-like features
I sincerely hope the upcoming roadmap includes feature sets similar to that of Trac. This has long been my only reason not to fully commit to OpenAtrium. Proper SVN/DVCS integration into the issue tracker, wiki and discussion board would be a killer feature.
Oh, and I applaud this acquisition. It's a great example of 'organic business' the way this was just a natural step that greatly benefited both companies.
Congratulations!
Congratulations to all involved here.
It's great to see this level of collaboration between shops, and it's also great to see a move that really reinforces the value of distributions/install profiles within Drupal.
Looking forward to seeing where this leads. Fun times ahead.
Congratulations
This sounds like a very promising and exciting partnership. As huge fans and users of Open Atrium (with a little dabbling in Managing News), we're delighted to see Phase2 taking them to the next step, and very interested to see what else this partnership may bring.
-Laura Scott, PINGV Creative
"Purchasing?"
Clearly I'm not a business major, but what does it mean to "purchase" an open-source project? I love the idea of OA and MN getting more users and more attention, just curious about the business-side of things. Congrats to Phase2 and DevSeed!
Curious as well...
Best I could think was that, as implied in the news release, that Phase2 would take over full maintenance of the codebase and also take on DevSeed's clients that are using those products. This would "free up DevSeed..." to work on other projects.
That's what I guess happened, but I would love to hear more details if Phase2 were wiling to share.
Overall, I think this is very cool news, and I appreciate learning about this type of business occurring in the Drupal space.
Great News
This is really great...
wrote recently a features & overview post for Open Atrium in German
Hope to hear more from you about this in Chicago ;)
Ivo Radulovki
This is so exiting, I'm
This is so exiting, I'm looking forward to the "other plans" too.
Love your choice of words btw "The ecosystem around Drupal is evolving." Indeed !
See you in Chicago
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