350 Clients Now Use ownCloud Enterprise Edition

ownCloud GmbH continues down the road to success in 3Q16.

Following the departure of the co-founder and CTO, and the establishment of an ownCloud fork, the management team, led by CEO Tobias Gerlinger, and COO and founder Holger Dyroff, have retained the confidence of the clients while expanding the operative business.

In the third quarter, 40 organizations renewed their contracts with ownCloud or chose ownCloud Enterprise for the first time, which means that over 350 clients now use the ownCloud Enterprise Edition. The final list includes household names like Deichmann, Human Rights Watch, the German soccer league (DFL), Lufthansa Technik and the City of Cologne.

Success has also been achieved in expanding the partner network: currently, more than 50 contract partners have made a commitment to ownCloud, including Red Hat, Dell and Comparex. The most recent additions include partnerships with Computacenter, Fujitsu, Grau Data and Collabora.

A partnership agreement for the North American market has also been signed with XTIVIA, Inc., whose workforce has now been trained so that they can serve customers and prospective buyers on-site. The world’s largest ownCloud installation, Project DigiLocker, from the Indian Government, has meanwhile grown to more than two million registered users.

“We don’t want to gloss over anything, because, temporarily, the spin-off of Nextcloud as a fork certainly kept ownCloud on its toes. We had to dismiss nine employees in the US, which was a step that hurt,” comments Gerlinger. “Which is all the more reason why we are pleased with the success in reorganizing everything quickly, with our time-tested team as well as managing to attract new employees. This allowed significant innovations to be included in the launch ofRelease 9.1, such as 2-factor authentication and Windows Network Drive notifications. A positive side effect has also been the dismantling of old structures from the past, allowing us to align ownCloud better to the needs of our clients. Today, ownCloud is in better shape than ever before, and with a bulging development pipeline, we have great aims for future growth and further internationalization.”

Growth Capital and Personnel
In July, an investor group, to which Gerlinger belongs, started backing ownCloud. Made up of three institutions, the consortium sees the investment as a long-term commitment and the broad client base and potential that ownCloud offers have convinced the backers to provide capital for sustainable growth. The appointment of various new staff has brought the headcount backup to 40 at the end of the third quarter, 15 of whom are employed in the development team, and seven in support, deployment, and consulting. It was also possible to attract a new and highly respected security and PHP expert to join ownCloud. New appointments are also planned by the end of the year.

Community and Marketplace
In September, the firm staged the annual Community Contributor Conference at TU Berlin (Technical University of Berlin). A record was established with more than 150 registered participants. One of the main themes at the conference was the announcement of the ownCloud marketplace. Scheduled for launch in early 2017, both developers and business partners can use it as a platform to offer their ownCloud apps, plug-ins and extensions, ownCloud-based stacks and ownCloud templates, as well as consulting services, white papers and development services relating to ownCloud on a free or chargeable basis. This marketplace will soon provide developers with a modern, effective platform for distributing and monetizing their ownCloud-related solutions and services.

Contributor License Agreements and Dual License Model
Only Path to Legal Certainty
The company continues to require from each ownCloud Core developer a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which transfers all IP rights to ownCloud and, in return, assures the future availability of the contribution in open source. The developers also confirm that all their contributions are free of third-party rights.

“This forms the basis of our dual licensing model,” states Dyroff. “With a pure AGPLv3 license model, each user is required to publish the source code for each change or extension. The majority of our clients do not want to go down this path and want the choice of either publishing their own customizations or keeping their customizations for themselves. In the enterprise market, this makes the dual licensing model of an AGPLv3 coupled with a commercially licensed variant essential and only ownCloud is capable of offering this with the CLA.”