infoTECH Feature

December 20, 2011

ownCloud File Sharing Project Announces Commercial Entity

ownCloud, the popular open source file-sharing project, with more than 350,000 users,  announced last week that it has formed a commercial entity to take its open source based project to the next level. With this, ownCloud has entered the lucrative market for secure, manageable and easily accessible and sharable storage.

The company will be based in Boston and led by SUSE/Novell (News - Alert) executive Markus Rex, who has also founded the company. Rex will join the company as CEO and CTO.

ownCloud also revealed in a press release, that the newly launched company has received a round of funding from Boston based General Catalyst. Terms of the funding were not disclosed. Product and Services offerings will be announced in the first quarter of 2012.

ownCloud claims to combine consumer ease-of-use with enterprise security and claims to offer something more secure and better managed than Dropbox and box.net (News - Alert). ownCloud explained that being open source, its platform offers greater flexibility and no vendor lock in. These features make the file sharing project perfect for business use.

ownCloud enables universal access to files through a web interface or WebDAV. It also provides a platform to easily view and sync contacts, calendars and bookmarks across all devices and enables basic editing right on the web.

The installation is quick and easy with minimal server requirement and no requirement for special permissions. ownCloud is extendable via a simple, but powerful API for applications.

“In a cloud-oriented world, ownCloud is the only tool based on a ubiquitous open source platform. This differentiator enables businesses complete, transparent, compliant control over their data and data storage costs, while also allowing employees simple and easy data access from anywhere,” Markus Rex, CEO and founder of ownCloud claimed in a statement.

“With the explosion of unstructured data in the enterprise and increasingly mobile (and unsecure) ways to access it, many companies have been forced to lock down their data – sometimes forcing employees to find less than secure means of access, or, if security is too restrictive, risk having all that unavailable. When we saw the ease-of-use, security and flexibility of ownCloud, we were sold,” John Simon, managing director at General Catalyst noted in a statement.

Early this year, ownCloud made it to the 2010 open source 'Rookies of the Year' list provided by Black Duck Software (News - Alert). Working from a list of thousands of new projects launched in 2010, Black Duck evaluated a project's popularity using a weighted scoring system that awards points for commit activity within a project, the number of developers involved, and the number of web sites linked to the project. After auditing its findings and normalizing scores, Black Duck determined the top 10 Rookie projects.



Madhubanti Rudra is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell
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