A few weeks ago, the company I launched in July 2004 to support the XWiki development turned 4. It has been four very full years spent rolling out new versions of XWiki and achieving many successes.
The big news is that we have transformed the old XPertNet SARL into XWiki SAS (in French law it means we are bigger and we can have many many stockholders) and at the same time many of the XWiki SAS employees have become stockholders in the company.
Let's get a little bit back in time. The XWiki project was started in November 2003, with the first releases launched in February 2004. In July 2004 the company was created. In the early years, the project was supported by Erwan, Olivier, Thomas among others. Luis and Jeremi joined XPertNet and helped it grow up to 10 people by the end of 2006.
By the end of 2006 we had completed our second participation in the Google Summer of Code, joined OW2, landed significant clients including Curriki and won the XWiki Concerto Project, a funded research project.
Early in 2007 our current management team joined XPertNet : Vincent Massol became our CTO, Stéphane Laurière our VP of research projects and Pascal Bouche our VP of Marketing and Sales. Vincent has done an incredible job to create the XWiki open-source process, Pascal has boosted our Sales and Marketing and Stéphane has launched new research projects sustaining XWiki innovation.
Mid 2007 Sergiu Dumitriu and Marta Girdea - two of our former Google Summer of Code students - helped us set up XWiki Romania and we hired 5 engineers in the team. End of 2007 we had launched 4 products (XWiki Enterprise, XWiki Watch, XWiki Workspaces, XWiki Enterprise Manager), reached 100,000s XWiki downloads and more than 100 paying clients. XWiki had participated in many conferences including Javapolis (now Javoxx), JavaOne and Solutions Linux.
In 2007 we have also build partnerships with eXoPlatform (allowing XWiki to be integrated as a JSR 168 Portlet), with Avane to build Chronopolys, with Netcipia and Nearbee. Thanks to our own growth and our partners, this means there are currently paid XWiki developers on four continents (America, Europe, Asia, Africa - We should probably find an XWiki developer in Tahiti to get the fifth continent).
In 2008 we kept growing up to 25 employees (including former contributors and Google Summer of Code students) and won important clients as well as the Scribo research project that is part of the Systematic Competitive Cluster.
Since early 2007 we have worked on preparing the switch from XPertNet SARL to XWiki SAS and allowing employees to become stockholders of XWiki SAS. I'm glad to have been joined by our management team and many employees as stockholders of XWiki SAS. We have collectively invested 200KEuros to help grow XWiki.
We have also setup the XWiki SAS board which will define the strategy of the XWiki SAS company. The board is composed of the major stockholders of the company and a representative of the minor stockholders :
- Ludovic Dubost
- Vincent Massol
- Pascal Bouche
- Stéphane Laurière
- Jean-Vincent Drean (representing minor stockholders)
I'm also happy to announce the addition of Edwin Khodabakchian to our board. Edwin is a former Netscapee, ex-founder and CEO of Collaxa (now part of Oracle) and now founder of Feedly. Edwin has already advised XWiki in the last four years with his high experience of the software and internet Industry and has also helped us during our numerous Silicon Valley trips.
I'm very proud of where XWiki currently has arrived. I'm proud that it is at the same time a company providing quality products with quality professional services and an open community software. We are strong believers that the only "strings-attached" should be the quality of the services we provide to our clients, not the code itself. We are also strongly convinced that open software leads to higher quality software thanks to the scrutiny of the community. Open-source has also been in the last four year the best marketing tool for our products and services.
We are committed to continue investing in our software and our professional services for the benefits of our users and clients.
Finally I wish to thank everybody who made the growth of XWiki possible, including our former employees, all our contributors, all our clients and our team of employees who don't count their hours to make XWiki a great product and XWiki SAS a great success.
Ludovic Dubost\ President and CEO of XWiki SAS
