OrangeHRM and the new development model
Since launching their first beta version, in January 2006, they have gotten over 28,500 downloads at SourceForge. They will be a silver sponsor of next month's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The software runs under either Windows or Linux, and is licensed under the GPL.
Their main office in Secaucus New Jersey also contains 2 people, CEO Sujee Saparamadu and an assistant.
Yet this is a globe-girdling company. The chief technical officer is based in California, the chief architect in Texas. The marketing guy is in Denmark. And then there is the main R&D facility, in Columbo, Sri Lanka.
That's where Saparamadu grew up, in Columbo, where he says he actually played ping pong with science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke. After graduating college he launched Hsenid Software International Pvt. a decade ago with his brother Dinesh, specializing in mobile application and middleware development, mainly for telecomm and finance companies.
Hsenid, which does marketing in Secaucus and Singapore, also develops human resources software, but bringing that to market under a proprietary model did not make sense to the Saparamadus, so Sujee has been spun out into OrangeHRM and is seeking to complete a venture deal by Web 2.0.
Now, Orange is no open source come lately. Hsenid has two Apache committers on staff, who are given time from their other duties to handle their Apache responsibilities. It was that, he said, which led to making Orange an open source company.
"The business model is that in the future we'll have a commercial product, and before that an on-demand product. That's the revenue model. We'll also have support and customization. Right now the focus is to build the community."
Orange is taking ideas from users worldwide that will prod its own development efforts, and will take code contributions after its venture financing is complete and it's a "real" company.
This is the new model for software development. Your people can be anywhere, your company can come from anywhere, and you use the Internet to tie it all together. Makes sense to me. Does it make sense to you?