Thank You For The Positive Responses To The Recent Product Releases And ….
Wish you all a healthy, happy, prosperous and successful 2009!!!
A few days ago (in 2008!!!), I happened to meet and have dinner with an old friend Jae Chang. Jae was one of the co-founders of Internet Securities (later acquired by Euromoney; LSE: ERM). Jae, to my pleasant surprise, turned out to be an ardent fan and user of DotNetNuke. He said that he was pleased that we were funded; and that we were going to focus on further strengthening the platform and the business ecosystem. He also mentioned that he would tell his Boss that he could be at peace now (or something to that effect) …
I asked him why he felt so, and his answer was …
(The below is not verbatim. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down his answer at that time.)
“When a company invests in a web-based technology --- it is an investment of dollars, time and the company’s strategic energy … especially in today’s world. It is always reassuring to know that the technology will be around and will be supported for 5 to 7 years. Otherwise, one always keeps wondering what the product roadmap is … what the future of the technology is … what the stability of the organization behind the technology is … etc.”
The above is pretty much in-synch with one of our recent internal discussions.
DotNetNuke as a product and as an ecosystem has grown enormously this last few years – the growth has been phenomenal in terms of downloads, installs, product functionality, number & quality of extensions available, number of DNN vendors (module vendors, skin vendors, hosting providers etc.), etc.
However, we realize that, whether in business or life … you are either going up or going down … there is nothing called staying still.
So, what next for DotNetNuke?
The next step we believe is for DotNetNuke to become central or core or a required element of an organization’s (small & medium; perhaps large organizations as well!) software infrastructure. We have to become a mission critical piece of an organization’s software infrastructure – the framework hat helps organizations design, build and deploy their entire web strategy; i.e. both applications and content. In order to get there, our users and customers need to feel good & comfortable about the following …
a. … that the product has the inherent functionality & strength to fulfill the above goal(s)
b. … that there is a professional and well-run organization that will both lead & stand behind; and support the product.
c. … that there is an ecosystem of superior and stable service providers (SIs, module vendors, skin vendors and hosting providers) that they can rely on for customization, extensibility, maintenance, hosting etc.
The above are fairly broad high-level objectives. There will be a series of initiatives that we need to identify and execute on … to achieve the above. Those will happen over the course of time.
Meanwhile …
1. Do you agree that the above, i.e. becoming an even more critical part of our customer’s software infrastructure … is the right next step for DotNetNuke (at a broad level)?
2. Are the objectives (a), (b) and (c) reasonable to getting there?
What do you think?