It's been an incredibly busy first half of 2010 and I haven't had as much time to blog as I'd like to. With new offices in Budapest and Brazil, rapid sales growth and rapid product releases, there's always too much to do and not enough time to communicate! 

When you're always in the midst of all things Liferay you don't realize that the perception from the outside is not always clear. For example, earlier this year, with the final approval of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, some people were misinformed about the future of Liferay because they were under the impression that Liferay had been acquired by Sun or had been dependent on Sun for its product development.

So for the record, I would like to state simply that Liferay was not part of the acquisition of Sun by Oracle. Liferay has always been and continues to be an independent company, completely self-funded and privately owned. In our prior partnership with Sun, Sun basically had an agreement to use Liferay Portal for the re-branded WebSpace server, but Liferay was never dependent in any way on Sun for engineering or product development. 

Liferay's relationship to the Sun acquisition. 

This is important for our community and customers to understand, of course, as you all continue to invest in the Liferay platform. You want to know that your investment is going to be secure for many years to come, and you can rest assured that that is the case. Liferay is now the only major independent portal vendor on the market (all the others are part of a big vendor's stack agenda), and we are one of the most compelling enterprise platforms for building applications around social collaboration, content management and enterprise portal technologies.

It's also important to us because we continue to be very committed to our vision to make an impact in the world through business and technology. Liferay Foundation, a non-profit organization that is at the center of this effort, is funded primarily by taking a portion of the profits from Liferay, Inc. Using money for charitable contributions and innovative technology to help developing countries is not exactly top of mind for the Oracle shareholders. :)  

That said, we are happy to continue to work with any company out there that wants to innovate new technologies and business models around open source software, and of course Liferay is committed to its compatibility with Oracle's suite of database and middleware solutions. 

So, what to do if you're a customer that was using Sun's WebSpace server, WebSynergy, or are confused about which Oracle product to use? Give us a call or contact us to learn more about Liferay and what we can do for you.