ownCloud Announces Own Marketplace

ownCloud, Inc. intends to set-up its own marketplace in order to expand its ecosystem around ownCloud server, community apps and enterprise apps.

In the future, developers and partners will be able to use the marketplace to market and distribute their own commercial and open source apps. This will allow them to generate revenue from licenses, maintenance and support, and even distribute their apps free of charge.

The company’s marketplace is scheduled to launch in early 2017. The project will be showcased at the ownCloud Contributor Conference in Berlin, Germany, from September 9-15 – (agenda).

The company was founded in 2010 as a community project. In 2012, ownCloud Enterprise was launched with an enhancement for desktop clients and mobile apps. In the meantime, more than ten million users and 350 customers worldwide place their trust in the file sync and sharing platform.

Whereas the ownCloud Community has published more than 250 apps since then, the company itself has also developed a number of enterprise apps. In collaboration with Collabora Productivity Ltd., the firm recently presented an enhancement for editing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. In its Sharing Cockpit and with VNCsafe, Digitali uses logging and audit apps from ownCloud Enterprise for numerous customers from all over the world. VNC AG has developed an integration between the email collaboration solution Zimbra and ownCloud.

Bernd Rodler, CEO, VNC, welcomes the introduction of the ownCloud marketplace: “We have often been asked if we can provide support and maintenance for our ownCloud app VNCsafe. The up-and-coming enhancement of the ownCloud ecosystem and the marketplace now puts us in the position to monetise our efforts and invest in enhancements for the integration.“

“The ability to enhance and adapt ownCloud has always existed, but has been used very little, owing to the lack of opportunities for monetisation,” comments Tobias Gerlinger, CEO, ownCloud. “Developers from the community have approached us with the wish to create a marketing platform. The ownCloud marketplace offers developers and partners the opportunity to present their innovative enhancements and apps to the market and distribute them. Our aim is to use the new marketplace to further consolidate the ownCloud ecosystem and expand the leading position that ownCloud has in the market.“

Pros of ownCloud marketplace:

• Developers get the chance to market their own apps and charge for them.

• Web agencies can develop ownCloud themes and offer them for sale.

• Consultancies can market solutions for specific sectors and industries and develop business models based on these.

• Software houses can link ownCloud to their own software and market the integration codes under open source or commercial licenses.

• Workflows: ownCloud Enterprise began including workflow functionality in Version 9.1. Developers can now market customer or user-specific workflows over the marketplace.

To do justice to the flexibility of cloud-based IT infrastructures, the marketplace will support various license models. Besides being able to promote enhancements as open source for free, developers and partners can charge for maintenance and support, or offer their software in a subscription model under a commercial license, in the same way that ownCloud does with ownCloud Enterprise. The ownCloud Contributor Agreement, which provides legal certainty for company’s contributors around the world, serves as the basis for choice here. Any enhancement of the ownCloud core needs to be provided under AGPLv3, in which case the ownCloud Commercial License, as part of the ownCloud subscription model, allows for commercial enhancements.