Essentia Launches New Flagship Product For Open Source Communities

Portland, OR. --(Business Wire)-- Essentia, a developer of software platforms and solutions for online communities and commerce, today unveiled a new flagship solution, EssentiaESP, the first community-engagement platform designed specifically for commercial open source.

Offering a combination of distinctive capabilities available for the first time to open source communities, EssentiaESP unifies social networking, community management, and commerce with content management, software development and collaboration in a platform that supports multiple CRM integrations with administrator defined code for analytics and tracking. This unique feature set, available only in EssentiaESP, is needed to efficiently build and manage vibrant open source communities.

The company also announced the initial deployment of EssentiaESP for the 85,000-member JasperForge community, the open source development portal for the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite.

Currently, the options that are available for open source communities are to either roll their own custom environments using point tools or rely on collaborative software development (CSD) environments that have community and commerce added as an afterthought. Both of these environments fail to meet the requirements of modern commercial open source companies and communities, and actually hamper, rather than encourage, the growth of those communities. EssentiaESP is built from the ground up to facilitate community participation, ease administration and achieve rapid community maturation, driving strong business growth for commercial open source companies.

"The architecture and capabilities of traditional open source community platforms that were originally shaped a decade ago were created without any notion of the eventuality and influence of the Web 2.0 economy," said Gopi Ganapathy, founder, president, and CEO of Essentia. "Essentia addresses this need by delivering a modern platform that is built from the ground up to seamlessly discover, grow, and monetize communities for commercial open source."

EssentiaESP is a modern plug-n-play framework leveraging the latest technologies and social networking practices to offer flexible tools and process along with a rich set of features that are tailored to meet the needs of a thriving open source community of lurkers, members, contributors, partners and customers.

EssentiaESP introduces a breakthrough feature called Ecosystem Enablement that allows mixing local and remote environments within the platform while continuing to maintain consistency at the user experience, project workspaces, access and security. This allows open source companies to loosely integrate all community activities, such as discussion forums, wikis etc. related to their projects from within their ESP-based community.

"EssentiaESP facilitates the discovery of community members across the various online tools and web properties they currently use, resulting in a larger community with increased contribution than expected by commercial open source companies, who then have the ability to centrally manage this on an ongoing basis," said Mr. Ganapathy. "Once that community is organized, aligned, and well managed, these communities become a source of significant revenues for their sponsors; thus meeting the ultimate goal of every commercial open source company."

The first production implementation of EssentiaESP will be to power the next generation of JasperForge.org, also being announced today. JasperForge.org presented the perfect use case for EssentiaESP with its large and dynamic community of over 85,000 registered developers, 300+ community-created projects, and extremely high volume of forum activity, sessions and page views. For more information, visit www.jasperforge.org.

"With the massive growth of the JasperForge community, we were faced with the dilemma of not only effectively scaling our infrastructure for the long term, but also harnessing the potential of that community in new ways that would benefit everyone involved," said Nick Halsey, vice president of marketing, Jaspersoft. "EssentiaESP brought tremendous experience and resources to the table and provided us with the platform through which we'll deliver next-generation capabilities to the world's largest and most vibrant business intelligence community."

An OSCON 2008 exhibitor (Booth #322), Essentia will present alongside its Jaspersoft colleagues on Thursday, July 24th at 2:35 pm in room E141 at the session "Delivering a Next-Generation Community Platform" which will use the JasperForge community as a real-world use case of the EssentiaESP solution.

Availability

EssentiaESP is available in standard, premium and unlimited configurations for both hosted and on-site deployment with an annual subscription. All subscriptions include full access to source code, regular product updates and 24x7 email-based technical support for installation and production. To learn more about Essentia's special introductory pricing and premium support and services, please contact sales at (800) 573-9137 or sales@essentiaserve.com and visit www.essentiaserve.com.

About Essentia

Essentia, the leading provider of solutions for commercial open source software communities, was founded in 2006 by experts in open source and collaborative software development who have delivered, deployed, and managed many of the most significant first-generation communities like OpenOffice.org, Java.net and Subversion. Essentia is a global company based in San Francisco, CA and Chennai, India with offices in Austin and Houston, Texas; New Jersey; London, UK; and Singapore. Essentia customers include Fortune 500 and emerging companies. More information is available at www.essentiaserve.com.

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