Start-Up's Profile: ownCloud

Headquarters and offices
Boston, MA with European HQs in Nüremberg, Germany

Date founded
Company: 2011, project: 2009

Financial funding
Seed round of $1.25 million

Main executives

CEO Markus Rex recently served as SVP and GM of Novell’s SUSE Linux Open Platform Solutions business unit. Previously he was CTO for the Linux Foundation. He was also Novell’s CTO for Linux and in various engineering management roles at SUSE.
CTO Frank Karlitschek is a long time open source contributor and board member of the KDE e.V. He managed engineering teams for over ten years and worked as head of unit and managing director at different internet companies.
VP sales and marketing Holger Dyroff joined SUSE in 1993 and developed early channels, marketing programs and product offerings. From 2001 to 2004 he was GM, Americas for SUSE, building a partner community and enterprise contracts in the US. In 2004 he moved back to Germany to run product management and marketing for SUSE. He serves as the vice chairman of the Open Source Business Alliance, an open source business organization in Central Europe.
VP products Matthew Richards most recently launched Agile Cloud Solutions for CA Technologies, and commercialized SUSE Studio for the SUSE Linux Enterprise business at Novell.

Number of employees
12

Products description
Start-up ownCloud is a commercial entity behind the Linux-based program ownCloud, an open source project for data and file sync, share and view. It enables businesses to host their own or remote cloud storage while maintaining regulatory and compliance needs.

owncloud_startup_profile

Released date
Each three-month cycle for the project since 2009. New commercial release on April 4.

Price range
Community is free, commercial to be announced

Distributors
First one: Univention GmbH, European provider of open source products

Number of customers
400.000 for open source version

Applications
Sharing files, syncing files, mobile stuff

Target market
SMBs and enterprises, hosters and telecoms through VARs

Competitors
Mainly Box.net, DropBox but also Egnyte, Accellion, GroupLogic, SugarSync, SurDoc, Vaultize, etc.

Comments

ownCloud is comparable to Dropbox - claiming 50 million users - and Box.net enabling to backup and share files in the cloud, but they are stored on someone else's servers without control over data by users.

With ownCloud, there is no vendor lock in for the enterprise that can roll its own cloud storage service. Users can run file sync and share services on their own hardware - for your 'own cloud' - and storage or use public storage hosting (Amazon S3, Google, etc.).

ownCloud could be the Dropbox of the enterprise, not only to sync files but also contacts, calendars and bookmarks across devices.

Released last January, version 3.0 introduces online editing, photo gallery, PDF viewer, application store and improvements to existing Internet functionality.

Open source ownCloud is a young software with some issues, for example in the SabreDAV version according to dfms.org. For ZDNet, "it's not as easy to set up yet as it could be, but that may change very soon."

The start-up will probably launch a more robust and complete product in few days.

Start-Up’s Profile: ownCloud

Will offer commercial version of open source software to sync files.

Comments