As you are very well informed on our new name nature and meaning (even on the pronunciation ), I would like to highlight other shift announced by our CEO -Nacho Correas- a few days ago: the opening up of the eBox Zentyal development.

Nacho referred to the new Localization Teams (or i18n, internationalization), a big success given the number of volunteers already gathered, and I want to talk about the development itself.

First of all, let me make clear that it is not that the development of eBox Platform has been closed from the beginning. The project is GPL since 2005 and the community has helped a lot in its evolution, mainly with feedback, testing and i18n. However, although there was a pretty good documentation for developing new modules, only a couple of guys from the community offered themselves to start coding (nothing happened though).

I know, we are a privately funded company, eBox Zentyal is not a foundation and the company is investing time and money with the idea of getting that amount N times in the future. Why anyone should collaborate in making us “rich”?

Well, actually, as you know, money is not the only issue we human beings care of. Moreover, there a lot of good articles out there explaining our reasons to collaborate and contribute to, e.g., open source projects, even when they are ruled by a private company. For this post, I just want to talk about one of them: self-interest.

The good thing of open source products is that anyone can download your software and build a new product, or just offer services on top of it. Honestly, we do it with Ubuntu Server and a bunch of open source modules, so we understand and support that others do it with eBox Zentyal as well. Open source is a source of innovation and business, it is good by itself.

Having said that, there are more than 3,600 members currently registered in our forum. Additionally, at least other 100 companies worldwide are offering services around eBox Zentyal. Even more, there are many public and private organizations customizing eBox Zentyal Server for their own needs.

So, the good news is that we are more open than ever to accept your contribution, share the IP and take care of it for your self interest, whether:

* You are a student who wants to get introduced in the open source world and, who knows, make a living of it…

* Your company is selling eBox Zentyal with some new small/big new modules, but you are busy enough giving services to invest more time in maintenance and evolution…

* Your organization is customizing eBox Zentyal for hundreds/thousand of schools/councils and, glup, it is going to be a mess to merge it with our new brand new version…

Then, be brave and start/continue developing the Zentyal module you always wanted to have, inside our community.

Contribute, we will be keen of helping and supporting you to do so, by self mutual interest.

Red Hat has thrilled based on a business model of selling subscriptions for his Linux servers, and they explain very well the value of Red Hat Subscriptions at their corporate website, using a language mostly oriented to final customers.

In a couple of posts, I am interested in putting some light on the benefits of eBox Professional Subscriptions, but from the point of view of  the eBox Partners who sell them.

For the sake of this post extension , I will talk only about eBox Professional Subscriptions, as Enterprise Subscriptions offer a different (and extra) value to partners. Then, from our website:

eBox Professional Subscription is intended for use in production environments in small and medium businesses. The subscription comes with a full version of the eBox Platform software and it includes Quality Assured software updates, guaranteed by eBox Technologies.

Furthermore, the Professional Subscription includes access to Virtual CIO that provides alerts on hardware functioning, network events, service availability and Internet connection, as well as weekly/monthly reports on the overall performance of the network and services, inventory on installed and active services and regular security audits on the system.

Quality software updates combined with Virtual CIO imply a couple of very straight forward values for partners:

• Security. The subscribed machines will have QA updates, meaning that eBox Technologies tests the patches and bugfixes internally and release them in its own repository, certifying that they won’t cause any problem. Therefore, the software installed at their customers just works, and it is automatically updated without any hassle for partners.
• Client loyalty. Additionally, partners will have all the diagnosis tools of the Virtual CIO (see above) and the possibility to contract 3rd level support from eBox. Reports and alerts, automatically generated, allow partners both to keep the servers up and justify the service given to customers without extra effort.

A consequence of security and client loyalty is more income with less effort for partners:

• Cash flow & low workload for the partner: Instead of charging a big amount of money per license (Microsoft model), eBox focuses on charging small annual fees to managed clients’ servers, sharing the benefits with the partner with very reduced (or zero) extra workload for them.

eBox certified Partners keep selling their own services for consultancy, deployment and technical support (the latest optionally backed by eBox), but with a complement for increasing security and and client loyalty, in form of eBox Professional Subscriptions.

Marten, you were so right! After working on eBox partner program during the whole 2009 Summer, eBox signed its first 3 official partners on September 2009. 9 months and over 200 partners worldwide petitions later, we have evolved our partner program to a more easy to understand and customer-oriented one.

From a DIY services offering based only on 3rd level technical support, to a server and on-line services subscriptions one, with public prices and growing discounts for partners depending on partnership levels (well known Bronze, Silver and Gold). More simple and packaged seem to be better.

Having certified and signed more than 20 so far, with ten currently in the certification process, during June we are reaching the 30 certified partners mark. All of our certified partners employ from 1 to 3 eBox certified technicians, who have completed the on-line course “eBox for network administrators”.

On the other hand, surprisingly, over 30% of the +200 companies that have requested us for partnership stated they were selling eBox already somehow, shaping a rich ecosystem of officially certified and non certified eBox providers. The more options, the best for our clients and community… The complexity of open source ecosystems is so complex as fascinating .

Still struggling to build a worldwide eBox VAR channel, we keep evolving our products and services to make them more simple to understand, sell, deploy and manage.

Marten’s MySQL lasted not less than 3 years to build a credible VAR channel, let’s see where we are able to reach in 9 months from now. Stay tunned.

“[...] We hope to reach 3.000 members in the following 6 months [...]“

And guess what, today, exactly 6 months later, May 18th, we have reached 3.000 users registered in the eBox forum… Should I try now guessing the lottery numbers?

However, I am afraid the 2.000 number given 6 months ago was not precise, by then we haven’t found out how many (SEO and the like) spammers  were hidden among our real registered users.

We did an important cleaning during December, and we kept continuously doing it since then. Therefore, our current +3.000 users are for real.

In the medium term, as soon as the forum software we are based on (SMF from Simple Machines) releases its new version, a revamped SMF 2.0, we will migrate and install some extra plugins to keep spammers out, or at least put it more difficult to them.

On the other hand, would any of you guess when the eBox Forum will reach 4.000 registered members?

eBox Platform 1.4 release has been a great step forward, more than 20.000 downloads in less than a couple of weeks are a clear evidence of the interest arisen. The huge increase of visits to our websites, partnership and support requests are the outcome.

On the other hand, our on-line store is bundled with the release of 2 new products we have been testing for the last 2 months: eBox  backup storage and eBox VoIP cheap calls.

As a consequence, eBox portfolio has growth and gained visibility, we are selling directly to our installed base and to and through our partner network.

First, we are offering directly to eBox’s users:

1. Technical support, one-time eBox support and safe migration from 1.2 to 1.4 support.
2. Subscription services, such as eBox backup storage, eBox VoIP prepaid credit and eBox Control Center.
3. Our first book “eBox for network administrators”! (only in Spanish currently though)

Tech support offered directly to eBox’s installed base is two fold: on the hand, helping SOHO users to solve punctual issues and doubts; on the other hand, assist companies on real-time to migrate from the good 1.2 to the great 1.4.

eBox backup storage is for those SOHO and SMEs which desire to keep their data safe off-site at a low price, and eBox VoIP is for those interested in making  abroad and international calls at very cheap rates, from their desktop using a softphone.

eBox Control Center gives the possibility to those companies with a number of deployments (e.g. several branches) the ability to monitor and administer their eBox Platform servers from a simple web interface.

Secondly, we are offering to and through our partners network:

1. To our partners: certified training, 3rd level technical support and eBox Control Center subscriptions.
2. Through our partners to their clients: eBox backup storage and eBox VoIP credit.

The certified training warranties both the partner and his customers a quality service by a qualified technician. 3rd level technical support brings them eBox developers on when required (issues, complex configurations). eBox Control Center provides our partners with a web easy-to-use and simple tool to monitor and administer their eBox Platform deployments.

eBox backup storage and VoIP credit grants our partners a recurrent revenue, while growing their portfolio within a win-win relation.

Our portfolio will include new SaaS products bundled to eBox Platform, but in the meanwhile we have tailored an offering for every eBox user, whether big or small. Compelling enough?