Category InitMarketing

InitMarketing Customers: Day, Magnolia, OTRS, YMC, Zimory

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Since founding InitMarketing in February, our customer base is steadily growing. Amongst others, we help the following companies with their Open Source marketing efforts:

  • Day is a leading provider of integrated content, portal and digital asset management software.
  • Magnolia is a leading commercial open-source Enterprise Content Management System based on the Java Content Repository standard (JSR-170).
  • OTRS is a leading provider of IT service management solutions that empower companies to automate their IT and align it to the needs of the business.
  • Young Media Concepts integrates ECM, CRM and BPM into a combined powerful and easy-to-use suite named Volano, based on eZ publish Open Source CMS.
  • Zimory is the first online marketplace where anyone is able to sell and buy server capacities world-wide on the internet through a web-based interface.

The kind of work we did and do for them includes marketing strategy consulting, coaching for VC pitches, website evaluation and re-launch, writing white papers and case studies, organizing event participation, executing media campaigns and more from the broad range of Open Source marketing services that InitMarketing offers.

Thanks to all our customers for trusting in us! We know that without them, we would not exist and we are wholeheartedly committed to making them successful.

Find more information about our customers at www.initmarketing.com/customers.

Roberto Galoppini from Italy Joins InitMarketing

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

The InitMarketing team welcomes Roberto Galoppini who will join us from today. He is located in beautiful Rome, Italy and a highly valuable addition to our team.

Roberto has taken an active interest in several free/open source software organizations. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the SourceForge Marketplace and acts as the Institutional Relationship Manager for the OpenOffice.org Italian Association. Roberto is also a technical writer for IT and computer-related magazines.

Most notably, I value Roberto’s experience as an Open Source entrepreneur which aligns nicely with the pragmatic marketing approach we pursue at InitMarketing.

Roberto regularly blogs on commercial Open Source software at http://robertogaloppini.net.

I am very much looking forward to working with Roberto!

Andreas Heer from Switzerland Joins InitMarketing

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Andreas Heer joins InitMarketingThe InitMarketing team keeps growing. This time Andreas Heer from Switzerland joins us.

He is a great addition due to his strong background as a journalist of German-speaking newspapers and magazines in Switzerland. Andi is a board member of /ch/open, the Swiss Open Systems User Group. With Andi’s expertise, our Open Source marketing services can only become better.

Andi, great to have you on our team!

Wirawan Harianto Wins InitMarketing Logo Contest

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

I am happy to announce the winner of the InitMarketing logo contest. We received 34 logo submissions and we would like to deeply thank everyone who participated. It was great to see the logos coming in since the very first days of the contest. Many of them are well thought out and we very much appreciate the time each of the participants invested to contribute their ideas.

And the winner is: “Orange Hit” of Wirawan Harianto.

Winner of InitMarketing logo contest

Four out of five InitMarketing team members opted for the winner logo. We believe that it is a true iconographic representation of InitMarketing. In fact, the creator of the logo said it himself so well in his logo description.

Wirawan Harianto is currently a second year graphic design student in Sydney Graphics College, Australia, wanting to specialize in Web Design. He is an open-source enthusiast translating online documents of open source projects into his native language, which is Indonesian.

We will now develop our corporate design together with Wirawan, which will include:

  • InitMarketing logo (enhancing the logotype)
  • InitMarketing website
  • InitMarketing business cards
  • InitMarketing letterhead

Following the open source tradition, we make our corporate design efforts public and welcome everyone to contribute with feedback, starting with the logo’s first revision.

Vikram Vaswani from India Joins InitMarketing

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

Vikram Vaswani provides Open Source marketing services in IndiaAs of today, Vikram will join the InitMarketing team and run the InitMarketing office in Bombay, Maharashtra India. He is an experienced technical writer who already published several LAMP books and contributed articles to various developer zones such as IBM developerWorks and Zend devzone. Furthermore, Vikram has an MBA from Oxford University and thus blends technological expertise with business know-how.

I am very happy to welcome Vikram on board, especially because now InitMarketing can provide better marketing support to the emerging Open Source market in India.

Marketing Microsoft's Open Source Partner Program

Sandro Groganz 5 Comments

Through our Open Source marketing consultancy, Stephe and I are currently in contact with Microsoft evaluating how we might help them with marketing their NXT partner program geared towards Open Source ISVs.

Very recently, Microsoft’s OSS partner program has been heavily criticized by Mary Jo Foley and Matt Asay (in reply, Stephe provides background information). Furthermore, the credo of InitMarketing is: “If you are Open Source, we will help you succeed”. Our corporate mission is to foster the success of Open Source in general.

Our first major concern was: Would an engagement with Microsoft foster the success of Open Source as far as their partner program is concerned? Could InitMarketing live up to its claim?

While Microsoft’s flagship products are not open source software, if InitMarketing helps open source ISVs to optimize their interoperability with Windows through the Microsoft partner program, then this will benefit Open Source vendors, opening up access to new customers and a higher distribution of their OSS products. From that standpoint, I believe InitMarketing can live up to its claim.

Our second major concern was that we might sacrifice InitMarketing’s yet young and innocent reputation as a trustful actor in the Open Source domain. To tackle this problem, we proposed to Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab and ISV team to make our work highly transparent to the Open Source community.

Microsoft supports us working in this transparent manner.

The benefits of open communication around the NXT program are clear for everyone involved:

  • InitMarketing can establish itself as a neutral facilitator.
  • The Microsoft ISV team can understand better the concerns of the open source community in general and ISVs in particular and gets valuable feedback which helps to improve the NXT program.
  • By having InitMarketing communicate in the Open Source style (= transparently), it raises trust in the NXT program in the broader context of Microsoft messaging.

We feel very comfortable entering this sort of working relationship with Microsoft. We still value your feedback: Would you do Open Source marketing for Microsoft?, asks Stephe – please let him know your comments.

InitMarketing Launches Open Source Marketing Services

Sandro Groganz 3 Comments

The Open Source marketing consultancy I have been setting up since several weeks has a name from now on: InitMarketingâ?¢. Plus, the InitMarketing Web site has just been launched at www.initmarketing.com.

Before I walk you through the Web site, I would like to ask for help: InitMarketing does not have a logo yet, hence we invite the whole world-wide-web-world to the

InitMarketing logo contestInitMarketing Logo Contest

Win an iPod touch!
With 32GB
Plus $50 for iTunes

Submit your logo design

OK, back to http://www.initmarketing.com: There you can read about the excellent Open Source marketing team I was able to pull together. Please let me know if you would like to join us, because we need some helping heads due to a never ending stream of new clients.

You can take a look at the Open Source marketing services offered by InitMarketing to better understand how we can support Open Source companies and organizations in becoming more successful.

Yet, we cannot disclose the customers we already work with, but this is what I can tell you in confidence: They are all well-known Open Source vendors and contributors, some in the PHP world, others using Java. There are also some other great Open Source companies and one foundation we are currently negotiating with.

The InitMarketing Web site also hosts the Open Source marketing forum where we invite everyone to ask and answer questions – the InitMarketing team will do the same.

I am extremely happy that we reached this milestone and as promised before, I will continue to keep you updated about InitMarketing here in my Weblog.