[LINK] AGIMO open source solution "whitebranded"

[Viveka Weiley]

On 4/28/05, Avi Miller <avi.miller at squiz.net> wrote:
> Deus Ex Machina wrote:
> >>above organisations, but attract an installation cost from corporate
> >>entities, not a licensing fee.
> >
> > install fees must be chunky.
> 
> No, not really. We don't make much money out of selling software, nor do
> we intend to. We make money out of selling services.

I have a user tale to tell here. I have a client with a small business
moving online, and I recommended that use a CMS. He was worried about
high maintenance costs for proprietary systems - "What if I want to
add a shopping cart? Will they have me over a barrel?" so I surveyed
the Open Source CMS scene and recommended MySource since it had the
functions he needed and he could get local support from the developers
(Squiz). He happily paid squiz to install MySource and also to
maintain and extend it for a while.
Then he wanted to extend the site for e-commerce, which would have
taken more than one package. Squiz's prices are pretty competitive for
this kind of thing, but he was able to find a third-party consultant
with experience deploying MySource at a university to do it cheaper,
and also to do small content maintenance jobs that seemed a little too
fine-grained for Squiz.

In the end Squiz isn't getting his business, but he is still using
their product so at least they're still in the market for his
business. Squiz did manage to sell him quite a few services early on,
to mutual benefit - and if their product hadn't been FOSS he wouldn't
have gone to them at all.

At the time he found his MySource consultant they were fairly thin on
the ground. I expect that having the imprimatur of AGIMO will lead to
more users, and from there more consultants, and hopefully for Squiz
more third-party developers contributing to their codebase.

Regards,

V.
-- 
Viveka Weiley, Karmanaut. http://www.karmanaut.com
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