The LoopFuse team recently returned from a great week in sunny San Francisco, where we day beau ed LoopFuse, One View, 2.0(Beta 1), Enteprise Edition. Our Enterprise Edition builds on the existing reliability of our Open Source Edition and adds a campaign management module for those wishing to track ROI on different types of marketing campaigns. It includes an entire eMail marketing suite and internet-based or print campaign management. I will blog more on Enterprise Edition 2.0, as we get closer to the release date, June 15th, 2007).

Before I get in to the list of highlights, I’ll mention that every discussion concerning JBoss’ growth and final acquisition centered around its marketing/sales force being able to scale efficiently using demand generation technology. I was amazed at the amount of open source companies that don’t have anything like LoopFuse in place. C’mon guys, you have thousands of visitors hitting your website, downloading PDFs, binaries, posting in the forums, reading the wiki, and you have no way of identifying, nurturing, and selling them on your service offering. Demand generation is a natural fit for OSS. This is a no-brainer.

Some show highlights…

• The show attracted the most notable of open source companies (Mule, Alfresco, SugarCRM, Jaspersoft, ZenOSS, Hyperic, RPath, etc…) yet had more of a businessy nature, ie. this is not a developer conference. It was evident by viewing the presentations that this conference is a must for any open source business to have a presence in. Simply meeting others in your space and learning what works/doesn’t, was enough to justify the expense of getting there (and paying $300/night for a hotel room, while being accosted by the rather abundant homeless presence in SF).
• Most of the people we met stated that Dave Rosenberg (MuleSource) and I were somehow separated at birth. Dave should be scared.
• I was graced with Matt Asay’s presence for 3 minutes and 23 seconds. Yes, he’s on our advisory board, but we have never met in person until then.
• Matthew Szulik’s (Red Hat) keynote was the usual for Matthew… He is one of the most brilliant speakers I have ever seen (think Ronald Reagan with a touch of JFK), being able to stand up in front of a crowd and hold their attention for the entire duration. Of course, he opened his address with a Red Hat, “Truth Happens“, video on Open Source. Great video. Great speech.
• I felt bad for the folks at the Microsoft booth. They seemed lonely, so I spent a bit of time chatting with them on Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration. That concludes my charitable givings for this year, thanks.
• Wow, there were a lot of law firms at the show!
• Our booth was flanked by a law firm on one side and EA Technologies on the other. With those options, its fair to say we became good friends with the guys at EA.
• The demonstration setup was abysmal – having a speaker address the audience while they’re eating lunch and conducting business talks does not make for a good product demonstration scenario – so Tom and I trashed our demo and created an eye-catching Flash show that was aired after it passed the InfoWorld Censorship Board. You can see the end-product, here.
• Both, rPath and SnapLogic have some interesting technology, we’ll be looking deeper at. They’re both on my list of most innovative tech in OSS today!

Overall, this was a great show with great presentations in a great location. Kudos to Asay and the InfoWorld team for putting this all together!

Several people have emailed me about my thoughts on the Silverpop acquisition of Vtrenz (press release), so I felt compelled to write this blog entry. Overall, this is a snoozer of a headline… average player merges with average player that couldn’t quite make it on its own. Allow me to sleep through this one.

Context: I should say at this time, that both Tom (CoFounder, LoopFuse) and I, once worked at Silverpop many moons ago.

The interesting thing about this acquisition is not that an email marketing company buys a demand generation solution. What it shows is that email marketing companies are eager to differentiate themselves. Although being able to send out mass emails is impressive, as a communication method it provides little-to-no value for the sophisticated marketer wishing to implement a closed-loop solution, increase efficiency in his sales and marketing organization, and qualify potential leads. Possibly the most compelling case for differentiation is the email marketing industry itself. It is crowded by an enormous number of companies offering the same services, while undercutting each other for 1/100th-of-a-penny-per-email cheaper than the other. In essence, its a race to the bottom. How long will that last?

Judging by the great appeal of our hosted and commercially licensed (OEM) solution, I can safely say there are many email marketers that are following this line of thinking. Its a natural progression for email marketing companies to grow in to a full marketing and sales solution. Clearly, being an open source solution affords us some luxuries that our competitors cannot benefit from. For the average email marketing company, being able to take our software, re-brand it, and have full training and support services from our staff is a win-win. They benefit from instant differentiation with a low-cost and full-featured demand generation solution, backed by proven 24/7 support services.

I applaud Silverpop for thinking forward, but I’m still sleeping through the news.

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