The Future of Liferay? Stronger than Ever

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. 

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Rather a small fish in the world wide ocean with vision, passion and tenacity than a big fish in a shark tank with only profit and market domination in sight without any soul.

Small fish are friends... not food... Nemo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x9W70LJKVw
Sharks, well they don't change, do they?
Given the roadmap: http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/RoadMap

I would question the "rapid product releases" and "Liferay was never dependent in any way on Sun for engineering or product development".
The state of WSRP in 6.0 CE is also a concern.

Thanks for the funny picture and great enthusiasm !

Bruno
Bruno, while we were in the Sun relationship there were certain things we had to do politically (such as the attributions on the road map) to give the appearance of an equal partnership but the reality is apparent from the commit logs.

I'm also not sure why you're questioning the rapid product releases, but keep in mind that we're talking now about six different product versions: 5.1 EE, 5.2 EE, 6.0 CE, Social Office EE, Social Office CE, and 6.0 EE. There's also the Liferay IDE 1.0 and Alloy UI 1.0 that are all being developed and had various releases throughout the last five months.

In any case I'm not trying to be defensive or confrontational, I just think it's important that people understand the truth.
Bryan,

The metaphor of shark is overbearing, it is offensive to Oracle.
We are just working an independent portal under the war between Oracle and IBM.

Survival at the DMZ like Casablanca at WW2
Oracle CEO Ellison challenges IBM: "make our day" in business
http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2009/10/15/2009-10-15_oracles_ceo_to_ibm_come_on_make_my_day.html
What do you think of the future of CE? Will we watch the same as DotNetNuke, where most module source code is no longer available?

I understand that CMS market must be competitive and that surviving from support must be hard, also preventing developers to earn money from your hard work, just hope you don't set a price to each portlet

This topic could be worth an article maybe?
Pablo, there is no reason to question the future of Community Edition. We are committed to continuing to making high quality CE releases available. I don't know the details about DotNetNuke, but I think they are VC-funded, which I'm sure adds to the pressure to hit specific numbers in a specific timeframe. Liferay is enjoying strong growth as well but we are ultimately in control of the company and will make our own decisions about how to offer a strong CE and maximize our revenue potential.
yes, that's true this is purely independent.Not let them make this impression again. Thanks Bryan...
I think the you guys have a lot bigger fish to fry than that shark up there. Which license stuff falls under is another bit of distracting trivia. You need to focus on your core objectives - which is working on the next release of your portal product.

If you really want to continue to have a future, you need to get to work addressing all of the issues, complaints, etc. that were gathered up and placed into the Proposals wiki. So far, I'm not seeing that very much of that has been addressed. You are also going to have to address your data structure and your security problems. And you have glaring security issues. Added to that, you're also going to have to find some resources address some of the needs of your customers. I've just been checking the Proposals wiki and it doesn't look like very much is being addressed.
I'm happy that someone el se is aware that most of the suggestions in Wiki weren't taken into consideration, wrote a post about it, all I got was a negative answer emoticon

I was concerned when the RC came out, because it meant that the "new features" stage was over
Hi Pablo, Lisa.

First, thanks for your feedback and sorry for the late reply. It's been a busy month with the Symposium and some personal travels.

Regarding the Proposals Wiki, the timeline of things was such that 6.0 was supposed to release early this year but engineering delays got the better of us. I don't quite remember when the Proposals system was first put together but it was probably part way through the 6.0 cycle.

We're trying some new initiatives starting with 6.1 that should help address the Proposals Wiki suggestions.

1. We're formalizing Product Management. We're getting to a size where we need to actively consolidate, prioritize, and design the product from a functional and business requirements perspective, not only a feature-by-feature basis but across entire functional areas (WCM, DM, Collaboration, Social Networking) and across the product as a whole. We've done elements of this in the past, but now we're going to make a push into developing a strong Prod Mgmt practice within the organization. This will of course take into account not only our own ideas for Liferay Portal but also funnel in feedback from the community and our customers.

2. We're trying to engineer more capabilities as plugins. This means that while some of the suggestions such as improvements to existing functionality will have to wait for 6.1, others may be released before 6.1 as plugins.

3. We're assigning someone from Prod Mgmt and a Technical Architect to each functional area to own and manage collecting requirements, refining existing features, and innovating new ones.

I know it must be frustrating to have to wait so long for some of the requested features to be implemented but we are doing our best and are excited that we've had so much participation from the community already.