DotNetNuke Ready For Its Open-Source Channel Close-Up

Company:

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: DotNetNuke Professional Edition 5.1

Year Founded: 2006

Number of Channel Partners: Recruitment beginning now

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: One of the hottest open-source application frameworks of the past decade recently debuted a commercial edition, and finally has a partner program in the works.

The Lowdown: DotNetNuke the corporation grew out of DotNetNuke the project: an open-source web application framework written in VB.net and intended for content management. In 2001, the original DotNetNuke application was born out of an earlier project, IBuySpyWorkshop, which was created by developer Shaun Walker. After a brief sponsorship agreement with Microsoft following the first public release of DotNetNuke, Walker decided the product should be open source, and DotNetNuke remains the largest open-source Microsoft community, boasting more than 700,000 members.

DotNetNuke grew popular, averaging 150,000 downloads a month according to DotNetNuke President and CEO Navin Nagiah. To meet that popularity, several DotNetNuke executives, including Walker, formed DotNetNuke Corp. in September 2006. By November 2007, DotNetNuke had seen four million downloads from 56 public releases of the framework. Nagiah and additional executives joined the burgeoning company around the same time, and in November 2008, DotNetNuke announced Series A venture capital financing from partners Sierra Ventures and August Capital.

In February 2009, DotNetNuke released the first commercially available version of the framework, DotNetNuke Professional, which was followed earlier this month by the updated DotNetNuke Professional 5.1. The Professional edition offers quite a few features not available in the Community Edition, including support for Google Analytics functionality, advanced content approval to create custom workflows, page, module and folder level extended permissions that provide, according to DotNetNuke, more granular security rights, and a distributed caching provider to more efficiently leverage resources in web farms.

It's on the Professional Edition that DotNetNuke has begun to build an indirect channel, and as Nagiah says, "nurture a commercial ecosystem." According to Nagiah, the company has seen success with the framework everywhere from small and midsized companies to government agencies, and recently hired a director of alliances to spearhead the design of its partner program. The goal, Nagiah said, is to grow gradually through partners and eventually get to a point where indirect sales account for half the company's commercial business.

"Amongst open-source companies, whether it's Alfresco or SugarCRM or others we are watching, typically the indirect revenue begins between seven or eight percent and goes up over time," Nagiah said. "To begin with, for us, it would be a small percentage, but on the horizon, I see it getting to more like 40 or 50 percent."

On the commercial side, an annual subscription for DotNetNuke Professional Edition runs $1,999 per instance, with more extensions available for purchase from the DotNetNuke Martketplace.

"Indirect revenue is going to be a big trend," Nagiah said. "It's going to take a number of years to build a channel and push it out, and right now, we don't have a formal partnership program. We are informally working with partners, however -- we have a straw man of a partner program in place -- and we are working to fine tune the program and finally launch it within the next six weeks."