New professional challenges

129 days since my last post in this blog. The earth has completed one third of a circle around the sun. 44 million people have been born and 20 million people have died on earth. Around 18.000 species have disappeared on the planet. And there is a new president at the White House. All of this and much more happened since my last post.

But what could keep me so long for posting? Work, it couldn’t be otherwise. Over a year ago we considered that eBox had already enough entity to become a company by itself, so we span it out from Warp, creating eBox Technologies S.L., getting some seed funding and starting to develop its own business model. Well, the whole past twelve months have been focused mostly on building the new organization and hiring the right people. By December, when I wrote my last post, we had already an excellent technical team (lead by our beloved CTO, Javier Uruen) and we started the enormous task of forming the management team, which until then consisted basically on I, me and myself. Now, it is up and running, and it looks really promising, with Javi Vázquez as our operations officer, Heidi as our marketing officer, Koke as our IT officer and (last but not least) Esther as our happiness officer.

However, that was not the only professional challenge I have been facing. By the same time when we founded eBox Technologies, the companies in the region decided to join and founded an association of open source businesses, where I was chosen the president. It sounds very glamorous but I can assure that being the president of a just born association means a lot of work and no glamor at all. So, we created CESLA, defined a strategic plan during 2008 and in the last few months we have been putting this plan into practice, launching the first projects and organizing the first CESLA event.

Moreover, being the main responsible for CESLA included also a site on the board of AEIA, the regional IT association. During the last few months AEIA has suffered a full renovation, including board, strategy, management, statute and even name and logo. It will be all presented in ten days, so stay tuned

And finally, right after its foundation CESLA got integrated in Asolif, the federation of open source businesses in Spain, which guarantees a site on the board for the president of each regional association. Asolif was founded around the same time as CESLA, so it needed a similar effort to be launched. Now it is finally organized and with a growing activity, thanks to the actions taken by its president Dani and its new manager Agustín.

So many things have happened in the past months. I have learned a lot and met a bunch of interesting people. My context, goals and responsibilities have changed. My points of view have evolved. I think this is a good moment to start a new stage as a blogger, close this blog and start a new one with a different approach, lined up with the new challenges I am currently facing. More information in my next (and last) post in this blog

eBox among the top 8 general security solutions

Masters in Criminal Justice recently posted an article with the 100 Best Open Source security tools, and eBox was included among the top 8 general security tools. It seems a pretty broad list, including a very wide range of solutions from monitoring to email, encryption or even my favorite Internet browser, and most of the tools that I would propose for a top 100 are actually included.

We were very gladly surprised to find our product listed here and it proves that eBox is gaining ground as a serious option. And I can endorse this, as during the last months I have been barely able to reply to all the request for proposals and partnership applications that we have received

And eBox 1.0(rc1) was presented

As I announced previously, eBox 1.0 (the first release candidate of 1.0, to be more accurate) was publicly presented last Tuesday in an event hosted at the Aragon Institute of Technology in front of some 120 managers and professionals of the IT industry in the region. During the event we unveiled the commercial strategy and the business development plan that we are following with eBox. We also explained how and why we have separated eBox from Warp, founding a new spin-off to get to the market and continue its development. From the feedback that I heard at the end of the event, people were surprised and impressed about eBox, both because of the level of its innovation and because of the business approach and results that we are having already now. It was also quite impressive (and emotional) to hear the representatives of the Government of Aragon and the City of Zaragoza praising both Warp and eBox as two great show cases

The event has had a lot of media coverage in the printed regional papers and on the online sites, such as europapress, aragoninvestiga, cenatic, opensourceworldconference or somoslibres.org among many others.

But this was not the only interesting activity on the week: on Saturday the City of Zaragoza organized (with the support from Warp) the Day of Free Software, an event combining a didactic conference with an install party. It was a great success and some 3,000 CDs of Ubuntu were given for free. It was quite a new sensation to see people queuing with their computers waiting for help to install Ubuntu in their machines.

And now I am at Malaga at the Open Source World Conference which very probably is going to be a very interesting event

Releasing eBox 1.0

In less than two weeks we will be releasing eBox 1.0. It was about time to have a 1.0, after four years of development (three since we opened up the source code of eBox). Well, this is understandable as eBox is a complex technology and we needed to invest a lot of effort before we could have something useful. And there is still plenty of work to do, new modules to code and a tighter integration to implement. But now we have reached the functionality we planned in the start and it is time to celebrate

We are organizing an event to present eBox publicly and invite attendants for a few drinks. We are getting an important support from all the main local and regional public institutions, such as the Government of Aragon, the City of Zaragoza and the Institute of Technology, who will explain how open source is helping to foster innovation.

The event will be held on 14th October at 6 p.m. at the Institute of Technology’s Auditorium. The attendance is free (as in free beer) and open to anyone interested (of course). The official programme of the event is publicly available for download (in Spanish). See you there!

Untangle tangling with eBox

A few days ago Isaac posted about Untangle’s new marketing strategy, which is to aim for the words ‘ebox’ and ‘ebox-platform’ with Google ads (nothing new so far) and expressly mention eBox in the ad’s headline (Wow! That’s new!). Here is a sample:

Well, tactically there is nothing wrong with it, though in my opinion it is a major strategical error for several reasons:

1. eBox and Untangle are not direct competitors. Untangle is a network access and security software, carefully packaged to be easy to deploy and targeting small organizations. On the other hand, eBox covers many more features such as user, resources, communication and infrastructure management. It is not only carefully packaged but it also implements a very tight integration of different services, automating most of the tasks and avoiding the possibility of misconfiguring the network. It has a development framework and a web services interface to easily extend its functionality and connect with other applications. Finally, current eBox users range from home offices (eBox in a single installation) to large organizations with several thousands of users (eBox installed in several machines optimized for different tasks). In short, Untangle is a niche product, eBox is a multi-niche technology.
2. Efforts should be aimed to compete with close source solutions, already focused in rich segments of the market. There is a load of competitors with a similar market target than Untangle, such as SonicWall, Fortinet, Watchguard or Juniper, and being their open source alternative could be easy to position and a good long-term move.
3. Untangle is a California-based company with almost 20 M$ funds in series A and B. eBox is a self-funded startup in Spain. With such ads Untangle is positioning itself at a similar level than eBox from a market point of view. Technically there is no doubt that eBox is superior in most aspects, but Untangle has way more funds to develop a more established market position than eBox. However, they choose to show to the market that we are at a similar level. I have nothing against it but I do not think it is very clever to do so. In fact, I feel flattered and they have given us a good story to tell investors, like “Hey! Without any external funds we made a 20 M$ backed, California-based company feel threatened. Don’t you think we might be a good investment opportunity?”. Thanks, dudes!

ServOSS Seminar

Last Tuesday there was a seminar at Helsinki hosted by COSS and organized within the context of the ServOSS project. ServOSS is a research project lead by Nina Helander (Tampere University of Technology) and Mikko Puhakka (Helsinki University of Technology) aiming at analysing young companies with open source business models in order to extract some conclusions that can help to better understand how to launch sustainable open source based companies.

As a founding member of Warp and eBox I was invited to participate in the seminar and talk about some lessons on open source we learned in the four years since we started, both from a systems integrator’s point of view such as Warp as well as from a product based business’ such as eBox. It seems people liked very much about my presentation and they found it interesting. Seeing Finns asking so many questions in a conference was a new experience to me

Jing Jing Helles made a very interesting presentation, giving some hints about how the Chinese software market works and what should be the right approach to enter that market. I particularly liked a Chinese proverb she mentioned, which summarizes one of the main ideas pretty well:

Government policy is like the moon. It is different in the middle of the month than it is on the first day of the month. Government policy is also like the sun. When it shines on you, you flourish.

There were also presentations from other Finnish companies explaining their views and experiences with their open source based businesses, such as IBM (Finnish office), Mediamaisteri, Nemein and Cubical Solutions. Unfortunatelly, with my poor Finnish I could not understand all of them, but I still managed to catch a few ideas, about the customers perception on open source and how to overcome their fears, about the way they organized their companies internally, about their challenges of partnering with an open source vendor, … I was quite surprised by the level of internationalisation that all these companies seem to have, at least regarding their customers, so different to the regional focus in most Spanish startups.
This has been a very interesting trip to Finland, and also pretty nice, as the weather seems to be much better than in Spain

eBox officially in Ubuntu

Today eBox Platform entered universe repositories on Ubuntu, becoming thus an official package of the world’s most popular Linux distribution. The guys at eBox’s and Canonical’s technical teams have been working hard on it for the last six months, but finally it will be included in Hardy Heron, Ubuntu’s next release. This is a great step for eBox, for obvious reasons. Let’s hope it is also a step in the right direction for Ubuntu as it gets now a good alternative for Webmin.

eBox Forum launched

Three weeks ago we launched eBox Forum, a place for the community to discuss issues, propose improvements, report bugs and so on. We had had some requests from the users several times during the past months but so far we had thought that as we had mailing lists, having a forum made no sense. In fact, we are used to collaborate in a bunch of open source projects where the mailing lists are the way to go, where users are pretty tech-savvy, and we assumed that most of our users were quite comfortable with the lists.

Well, it seems we were wrong. After the first three weeks of eBox Forum, with Christmas holidays right in the way, we got around 80 members and over 200 posts, and all the traffic from the mailing lists has shifted to the forum. All this without doing any effort in marketing and promotion So, once again, listening to your users and not following your own assumptions seems to be the wisest.

eBox: Open Source Network Admin From The Desert

Last week I got interviewed by alarm:clock euro, a blog covering the business of technology startups that got interested in learning more about us and eBox. The interview is long but interesting, as it summarizes our genesis and evolution. Even I learned some things from us! I particularly liked the catch phrase at the end of their introduction:

“[...] Those points and the fact that it’s the only startup we know that is based in Europe’s largest desert sealed it for us.”

Being coded in Perl and developed in the middle of the desert maybe we should consider adopting a camel as eBox pet

Warp on TV

Warp, Libellium and others at SIMO. Thanks Fer.

Launching a virtual company

Last week I was in Tampere (Finland) attending the Openmind/Mindtrek event where I had the chance to meet quite a lot of open source people, from Finland and beyond. Surprisingly (or maybe not) I knew already quite a bunch of them. Henrik has a pretty good post about the event, the people and the beers with Stephe and Mikko (which together with the festivals of Pilar that started last Saturday are going to kill my liver ).
I must say that it has been one of the most interesting events I have been in the last year. The first day I ended somehow being invited to Novell’s diner for special guests and I was lucky enough to sit close to Monty and we had a great chat about how to launch a virtual company, as they did in MySQL. I felt really honored to be able to get his advice on this point, as we are considering the possibility of adopting MySQL’s internal model with eBox. Most of the things he said can be found in an entry of Zak’s blog (who was also at the event, by the way) but I would like to summarize the general ideas:

• Having a virtual company does not necessarily lead to cost savings, as the whole team has to meet three or four times a year and that’s costly
• On the other hand, employees are more motivated in the company and you create a better feeling
• Also people tend to be more efficient and productive, as they can manage better their time
• You can easily involve the best people in your project and they will stay in the company even if they have to move to different places
• Surprisingly the internal administration of an international and virtual company is not as complex as I first thought. It usually takes two weeks maximum to launch a local company, which will then ease all the labor contracts
• Great professionals are the most important. Everything else should be secondary compared to keeping them involved and motivated

The next day he gave a presentation on How MySQL was able to create a world-class product with the open source community, describing the way they started and grew and what was important in the beginning. Our friends at COSS promised to upload all the presentations after the conference, so keep an eye on their web site

Forming eBox board of directors

eBox has been so far a community project with no public plans of developing any business around it. So far. Today we released the first press note (also translated into Spanish) announcing plans to make eBox a commercial venture, forming the board of directors. Mikko Puhakka, Stephen Walli and Timo Teimonen have been so kind as to accept our invitation to join us in the adventure of developing a sustainable business around our open source project.

The press note explains everything so I just copy-pasted it below:

Zaragoza, Spain. Stephen R. Walli