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December 06, 2007
eBox: Open Source Network Admin From The Desert
This week we have a Q&A with Ignacio Correas of CEO and co-founder of Warp Networks, a three year old Spanish startup that is launching eBox, an open source enterprise network administration platform.
Warp, which is likely to spinoff eBox, is self-funded. It cobbled together the cash for R&D for eBox from government grants, open source consulting work, and from a strategic partner (that pulled out before the work was done and left the founders on their own).
It has attracted several business advisors that know a thing or two about open source, and who are on board to help the founding team.
Those points and the fact that it's the only startup we know that is based in Europe's largest desert sealed it for us.
Warp's hq is in Zaragoza, which is also the site of next year's Expo2008.
Zaragoza about 80 minutes from Madrid.
Q&A with Ignacio Correas (center in image below) CEO and co-founder of Warp Networks
> Why did you decide to create the company?
For several reasons...The year was 2004 and open source technologies were starting to be considered as serious commercial alternatives to other closed products. We had managed to put together some of the most open source knowledgeable people in the area, which was giving us a very important competitive advantage.
We had gathered some interest from potential customers and public support for our venture, even before starting. And all the founders were in a stage of our personal lives when we could commit ourselves completely to the success of Warp.
So we started offering consultancy, development and training services on open source echnologies. So far things have gone pretty well: we have more than 20 employees now, our turnover will be close to 1M€ this year and we have become technology providers of some large corporations, such as Vodafone R&D.
At the same time we decided to start the development of our own product eBox Platform together with another company in the region, DBS (this company closed down a few months ago). From our experience we knew that there was no easy, open source solution for the administration of corporate networks, particularly for small and medium size organizations, so we started coding it.
Our idea was to integrate several network functionalities, such as gateway, resource sharing, email server, security and so on into a single unit, that could be very easy to deploy and use and that could rapidly extend to other functionality. As you can imagine this was a pretty ambitious project: you can see an estimate of the effort at ohloh, a web site that makes several metrics on open source projects. We are reaching the functionality and stability that we were aiming for and are now planning for the launch of eBox into the market.
> How did you fund your software development?
On a first stage, we split costs with DBS. The deal was simple: we did the work and they funded our direct costs (programmers' salaries), while with our consultancy services we covered the rest of the costs (administration, office space, hardware and so on). We shared the rights and the management of the project.
When we reached our first important milestone, the release of eBox 0.7 under an open license in December 2005, DBS dropped out from the deal and we were left alone with the development. We needed to look for other sources of funding if we wanted to continue with eBox, so we approached CDTI, an organization dependant on the Spanish Ministry of Industry which funds innovative start-ups. They accepted our proposal and granted us the funds that, together with the income generated by Warp's services, have allowed us to complete eBox functionality.
>How many developers out there are suppporting the platform?
I have registered over 300 contributors who are giving us feedback, reporting bugs, translating the interface (it has been translated into German, French, Turkish, Danish, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, ...), creating new manuals and documentation, developing new modules. But this does not count a bunch of developers who give their contribution directly in our IRC/Chat channels and who leave no trace whatsoever.
The most important contribution we are having at this moment is coming from the people at Canonical, as they are integrating eBox in Ubuntu. This integration is expected to be completely functional by their next release, Hardy Heron, in April 2008.
If things go right eBox will become one of Ubuntu's official tools for network administration, reaching over 10 million users and increasing the amount of contributions we get.
> Do you think this is software that will have international usage?
Well, it already does. eBox has been downloaded over 50,000 times from quite many countries. During the past month the top ten countries downloading eBox (accounting for 50% of the total downloads) have been US, Spain, Russia, Germany, Italy, UK, Argentina, Netherlands, Canada and France. And I can guess that once it is integrated into Ubuntu the internationalization will be
even greater.
> Do you have any business angels working with Warp?
Yes. We have created a board of directors that is helping us in the preparation and launch of eBox into the market. We consider that eBox is mature enough for the market and we are now separating it from Warp and creating a new company that will be focused solely on eBox.
The business angels are:
- Mikko Puhakka (Holtron): a pretty uncommon profile, Mikko was the first investor in MySQL and is a researcher on open source
business models at Helsinki University of Technology
- Stephen Walli (blog ): a well-known open source
consultant based in Seattle. Stephen has been Vicepresident at Optaros and
Business Development Manager of Windows at Microsoft
- Timo Teimonen: a very experienced professional having had several advisory roles in startup companies, Timo has been Vicepresident of Nokia and area manager in IBM.
> Who are the founders of warp?
The idea of founding a company specialized on open source technologies came from six guys which were probably the best Linux experts and most active open source advocates in the region. A year before that, I had left a good job in Finland to try to start the same kind of company in Zaragoza (Spain), so when they asked me to join in as the non-geek member of the team I could not resist.
Thanks for the taking the time for the interview. And good luck!
Posted on December 6, 2007 04:25 PM | Posted to Early stage | Permalink
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