Greetings! It has taken me a while to get to the point where I could start communicating (or blogging!) with the ecosystem that is DotNetNuke. While I met many of you at the DevConnections Conference in Las Vegas more than a month ago; and have had phone conversations & email exchanges with many others ... I am yet to meet and interact with a lot of you. I look forward to that via this medium.
I hope this will be a forum where I can share our philosophy & values as a company and group; our perspective both on the ecosystem and the market; the various actions we take in the business etc. I will also take the liberty of sharing my perspective on business in general --- vision, strategy, sales, marketing, operations etc --- some of which will be specific to DNN Corp., but a lot of it will also be generic, but hopefully interesting & useful.
As all of you are well aware, DNN Corporation is now a venture funded organization. We are excited to be working with two Tier I venture firms in August Capital (Vivek Mehra) and Sierra Ventures (Tim Guleri). We are pleased to have Larry Augustin (open source visionary) as a Director on our Board to help us on our journey. There will be more business announcements that we expect to make in 2009 --- both from a team building and from a business operations perspective.
However, even as we do that ... there is one point I want to emphasize unequivocally. This investment came about, and this team came together because we liked the ecosystem and community as much as we liked DNN Corp. For us, 'community' and 'commerce' are inseparable parts of the ecosystem. They are both essential for the success of an open source project. They aren't opposing forces --- but complementary forces; very much like Yin and Yang. The two forces are essential to and feed off each other. The two together strengthen the ecosystem that is DotNetNuke; and the two together is what presents immense possibilities for the project and for all the players in this ecosystem.
We understand that a lot of you have built businesses on this platform; we understand that a lot of you have a lot of commerce on this platform; we understand that a substantial portion of your livelihood comes from what you do in this platform. We recognize and respect that. Importantly, we also understand that this platform is what it is today because of your support. We intend to work with you in taking this to the next level. What does 'next level' mean?
For me, very simply it means that ... what we have today is a large, intelligent & powerful product/technology ecosystem that is DotNetNuke. We have good commerce on this ecosystem but one that is still nascent. The next step for us is to work together in building a business ecosystem that rivals the product ecosystem in size, strength and intelligence.
We will be laying the foundation for that in 2009. We look forward to working with you in 2009.
... Meanwhile 2008 is coming to a close. Wish you all a very merry christmas, a happy holiday season and a simply terrific 2009.
Look forward to working with all of you in 2009.