The economy may be swirling around the drain, but revenues are rosy for Liferay (news, site), a provider of open source portal and enterprise collaboration software. The company announced 50 percent growth in revenue for its core business in the last twelve months.
Liferay’s Continued Growth
According to the company, the majority of revenue growth is related to increased adoption by organizations in financial services, health care, manufacturing and higher education, which are challenged with controlling IT budgets while offering more services. Many have elected to adopt an open source product with a lower acquisition price and pay for the assurance of support and professional services -- Liferay’s primary revenue generating business.
It isn’t just the lower price point that has made enterprises more comfortable with open source.
Many organizations are finding that open source products like Liferay offer the same, and sometimes more features, flexibility, large knowledgeable developer communities and more permissive licensing models than comparable commercial products.
In addition, since an entire industry has developed to provide professional support for these products, there are few reasons to be apprehensive about adoption.
The growth in revenue isn’t the only positive sign for Liferay’s strength in the market. The company also reported substantial growth in their OEM business. The average rate of downloads per month, an indicator of user adoption, has also increased from 64,000 to 125,000 from the same period last year. Visits to Liferay’s website saw a 41% increase in monthly visits.
What’s Next for Liferay
Liferay’s strong performance isn’t a ticket to take a break, especially given the number of open source and commercial competitors in the web portal market.
The company has big plans for the next half of 2011. Liferay plans to launch the Liferay Marketplace -- an "App Store" style site for Liferay add-ons and applications. End users will be able to find, purchase, download and install third-party Liferay applications through the new site and vendors will be able to sell their products.
Liferay hopes their new Marketplace will position them as the main destination for solutions built on the Liferay platform.
In addition, the company will unveil their next release, Liferay Portal 6.1 EE, at the upcoming Liferay West Coast Symposium in Anaheim, Calif., Sep. 21 and 22. As we recently covered, the Liferay 6.1 release will include full CMIS 1.0 support, among other things.
Yours truly will be attending the symposium on behalf of CMSWire, and I'll be sure to bring you the full monty on the latest updates.
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