By Rachel Chalmers
Sporting brand new support for WebDAV – the distributed authoring and versioning protocol that allows collaboration on web sites – the open source web application server Zope is beginning to attract industry attention. There’s been a lot more interest, a lot faster than I expected, says Paul Everitt, CEO of Digital Creations LLC, the company that created Zope. We just finished rolling out Zope for a 2000-login collaboration application, he said.
Since taking Zope open source in December 1998, Digital Creations has relied on consulting, support, training and vertical products running on top of Zope to generate its revenues. So far we have made money, Everitt reports, probably only about twice as much as we used to. Our revenues weren’t setting records then and they’re not setting records now.
That said, Digital Creations has moved offices and doubled the amount of space it rents. We’ve been doing a lot of hiring and we’re absorbing that now, says Everitt. The company now has 13 employees and expects to reach 25 by summer. So what’s next? Our major focus is to finish up and get into beta the next generation, Zope 2.0, Everitt says. Digital Creations intends to add some features to make Zope an enterprise information portal toolkit; what’s more, it hopes to have those features ready for Linux Expo in Raleigh, North Carolina in May.
The company is betting that the enterprise portals of the future will be focused around collaboration, not just publishing – Slashdot, rather than Yahoo. The Slashdot model is the only one that scales, Everitt explains, every company is made up of a thousand voices, and not all of those are inside the company. Customers, analysts and the press all have to work together with internal staff to get information where it needs to go.
That’s where Zope might gain an edge over hyper-competitive rivals like Viador, Brio and Sagemaker. It’s basically the only WebDAV server that’s available now, Everitt claims. It’s all about being a collaborative portal… we’re taking the power of standard web protocols into groupware and portals. That, I think, is the real magic. Stay tuned.
