The Redwood City, California-based company released the project management and scheduling tool under a Mozilla license earlier this month, and expects the impact of Open Workbench to cause real problems for Microsoft’s attempt to establish itself in the project management space.
We’re doing to them what they did to WordPerfect with Office, said David Hurwitz, Niku director of marketing. While the project is being promoted as the open source alternative to Microsoft Project Hurwitz insisted that disrupting Microsoft’s plans was actually fourth or fifth on the list of reasons behind open sourcing the software.
While project scheduling remains an important part of our overall solution, it’s not where there’s a lot of innovation going on. We saw it as a good deed for our existing customers to help accelerate innovation, and frankly an opportunity to bring attention to ourselves, Hurwitz said, adding that Niku came to the decision to open source its Workbench software after six months of discussions.
Drawing more users to its Clarity project portfolio management platform and away from Microsoft is also a key consideration, however, and causing problems for Microsoft is a significant side-benefit for Niku.
