I am extremely happy to welcome Terri Molini on board of the Initmarketing team. She can certainly add a lot of value to Initmarketing’s Open Source corporate communications services, given her vast experience. Most notably, Terri was 13 years with Sun Microsystems where she lead all world-wide PR efforts related to Open Source. In July 2009, Terri launched the Open Source for America coalition. Good to have you on board Terri, this will be fun!

I am very happy to welcome Annie Blandel on board. She lives in Southern France and is a senior-level marketing manager with a bunch of experience and expertise.

Entrepreneurship, recognizing and driving forward innovative new products and services, and powering international expansion, have been the cornerstones of Annie’s 25 year career in technology marketing. She has successfully delivered international marketing and business development campaigns for numerous established leaders in their fields, including Nortel, Intel, Cisco, HP.

She is furthermore a professor in Marketing for Master’s in IT & Project Management at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis (France).

Read more about Annie on the Initmarkteing team page.

Bienvenue Annie!

I am particularly proud to welcome Alexander Kempkens on board of the Initmarketing team. Starting in 2004 as a developer for the Mambo project he co-founded the Joomla CMS in 2005. Ever since he is working for the Joomla project as community manager and was the responsible of marketing/communications and events coordinator. In addition to that, Alex has recently finished his studies in International Management. Hence, he is one of the very rare people who have combined expertise in marketing, community development, software programming and business management with experience in the Open Source domain.

For the launch of Jahia United Content Bus, InitMarketing has created a video explaining the concept. Hope you like it as much as I do.

It’s been very quiet on my blog lately due to the fact that I was very busy with working for InitMarketing customers and in parallel brought InitMarketing to the next level.

InitMarketing is now 15 months old and keeps growing at a steady pace, not too fast and not too slow. I have recently added four more customer references to our Web site: IKS Project, OXID eSales, Jahia, todoyu.

My workload grew up to a point where I realized that I should do my first hire. Effective May 1st, a person in the U.S. started to work full time for InitMarketing. He is currently in probation and things look good. It’s a great relief for me to be able to transfer undone tasks at the end of my work day to the U.S. and receive finished deliverables when I start again my next work day. Of course, he’ll gradually start to manage customer projects himself and will also do sales to expand our customer base in the USA.

Ultimately, I can spend more time with my family now, especially with my little daughter. As much as I enjoy working for my customers and building InitMarketing, I don’t want to miss out on actively experiencing my daughter’s childhood.

Right from the start, I had a very good feeling concerning InitMarketing. I quickly realized from the feedback I got that I focused on the right niche at the right time. Today, things go together well once more. There are two people wthin InitMarketing who are interested in a partnership. We are currently investigating in setting up either a company with limited liability (GmbH) or a private stock company (AG) in Germany. The latter would better fit with the Open Source spirit of InitMarketing, where “credit where credits are due” would translate into “allot shares where shares are due”.

We’ll have our second child around August/September, hence I am happy to see today that InitMarketing is doing well; that others are happy to take responsibility and build the business together with me; that people are proud to work full time for InitMarketing; that the team of freelancers within InitMarketing is highly professional and knowledgeable. This all gives me the ability to support my family in a few months without sacrificing the quality of marketing services that InitMarketing customers expect.

Work-life balance at its best – but you’ll have to work hard to achieve it

I am very happy to welcome two great additions to the InitMarketing team:

Zak Greant is a good friend of mine, hence I am particularly happy to have him on board. Zak has solid experience building and managing online communities, developing electronic frontier business strategies and working with Free Software and Open Source licenses. For example, he had worked as MySQL’s community advocate and for the Mozilla Foundation.

I only recently met Dave Neary at OSBC and was deeply impressed by his understanding of the dynamics of consensus-based communities, and intimate knowledge of the concerns of businesses engaging with free software projects. Dave has served three terms as a member of the board of directors of the GNOME Foundation (2005 – 07) and was a developer and release manager of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) from 1999 until 2006.

Stefan Probst just recently joined the InitMarketing team. He formerly directed SUSE R&D efforts at Novell and thus has intimate knowledge about Open Source development processes. With this expertise, Stefan is able to support our customers in setting up or optimizing development methods that are in sync with community building efforts.

Now playing on InitMarketing.tv is a video interview with Bryan, who is Director of Open Source Strategy at Microsoft. I very much respect Bryan as a person and for what he says in the interview. His answers show that he is truly committed and understands the benefits well. Some excerpts:

So it’s really a noticeable trend where open source is clearly a part of the data centre in the IT environment. There are Microsoft technologies that are clearly a part of this.

The trend in the overall market, what we see and hear, all points to pragmatic, case-by-case evaluation of what meets customer needs, how do you combine things in interesting ways, and if you believe that open source has value, that shouldn’t really surprise you, that should just make sense.

Above video only shows the highlights. You can also watch or read the full interview with Bryan.

I am very happy to announce that Florian Effenberger of OpenOffice.org fame joined our team of Open Source marketing experts at InitMarketing.

Florian brings in a lot of experience in community building and he already helps our customers with related work.

Welcome Florian, it’s a pleasure to have you on board!

Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF) yesterday announced the winners of the Open Source Business Award. Two InitMarketing customers won prizes: todoyu won the 3rd prize (10k EUR) and OXID eSales shared the 1st prize (receiving 32.5k EUR).

OSBF annually awards innovative ideas, thought through concepts and promising business plans with the Open Source Business Award. It is being granted for innovative business ideas based on Open Source Software, which revolutionize the market and can set new standards.

Heise reports about the award in detail (German only).