Planet Zentyal

As you already know, eBox has changed its name to Zentyal, so eBox Platform Zentyal 2.0 is just around the corner. Actually, after Lenovo announced a couple of days ago its eBox game console name, we all have re-agreed that the name change was a (very) good idea

As you are very well informed on our new name nature and meaning (even on the pronunciation ), I would like to highlight other shift announced by our CEO -Nacho Correas- a few days ago: the opening up of the eBox Zentyal development.

Nacho referred to the new Localization Teams (or i18n, internationalization), a big success given the number of volunteers already gathered, and I want to talk about the development itself.

First of all, let me make clear that it is not that the development of eBox Platform has been closed from the beginning. The project is GPL since 2005 and the community has helped a lot in its evolution, mainly with feedback, testing and i18n. However, although there was a pretty good documentation for developing new modules, only a couple of guys from the community offered themselves to start coding (nothing happened though).

I know, we are a privately funded company, eBox Zentyal is not a foundation and the company is investing time and money with the idea of getting that amount N times in the future. Why anyone should collaborate in making us “rich”?

Well, actually, as you know, money is not the only issue we human beings care of. Moreover, there a lot of good articles out there explaining our reasons to collaborate and contribute to, e.g., open source projects, even when they are ruled by a private company. For this post, I just want to talk about one of them: self-interest.

The good thing of open source products is that anyone can download your software and build a new product, or just offer services on top of it. Honestly, we do it with Ubuntu Server and a bunch of open source modules, so we understand and support that others do it with eBox Zentyal as well. Open source is a source of innovation and business, it is good by itself.

Having said that, there are more than 3,600 members currently registered in our forum. Additionally, at least other 100 companies worldwide are offering services around eBox Zentyal. Even more, there are many public and private organizations customizing eBox Zentyal Server for their own needs.

So, the good news is that we are more open than ever to accept your contribution, share the IP and take care of it for your self interest, whether:

* You are a student who wants to get introduced in the open source world and, who knows, make a living of it…

* Your company is selling eBox Zentyal with some new small/big new modules, but you are busy enough giving services to invest more time in maintenance and evolution…

* Your organization is customizing eBox Zentyal for hundreds/thousand of schools/councils and, glup, it is going to be a mess to merge it with our new brand new version…

Then, be brave and start/continue developing the Zentyal module you always wanted to have, inside our community.

Contribute, we will be keen of helping and supporting you to do so, by self mutual interest.

Hi all!

There is only a day left before our brand new release! I want to explain you some things about the name change from the technical point of view, but if you are a current fan of eBox, I’ll explain also what other things you should do if you haven’t done them yet

First of all, our websites and emails are going to change from tomorrow on. It’s simple:

Remember to update your bookmarks and address books!

If you use Facebook or Twitter, don’t forget to become a fan of Zentyal or follow us in our new Zentyal twitter account.

IRC and mailing lists have also changed: you will be automatically switched to the new mailing lists (and probably you have already received the mails notifying that). Anyway, here’s a reminder of the new lists:

If you are an IRC user, remember to change your client configuration to point to the new channels: #zentyal and #zentyal-es (for Spanish speakers). The IRC server is still irc.freenode.net.

Let’s go now with the software-related stuff. First of all, here are the new launchpad PPA with the official packages and the Zentyal SourceForge project with the ISO images.

Finally, as doing a complete rebranding of the product just before a stable release is a bit risky, we have decided to use still some references to eBox to avoid any potential trouble. For this reason, you will still find “eBox” in the URL’s of the web application, in the name and path of the scripts, log files (/var/log/ebox/ebox.log), configuration files (/etc/ebox), etc. However, these references will be changed in the future but we’ll have to live with it in 2.0.

Some people have asked in the community forum how to pronounce Zentyal, as it does not seem straightforward in some languages. Well, the short answer is that we don’t care much about how people say it, as long as they say it The long answer is to mix Zen and Essential and pronounce it your way.

However, if you still want more detailed indications, here is a list of how we believe Zentyal should be pronounced in different languages:

Zentyal in English
Zentyal in Spanish
Zentyal in German (I had to tune this one a little bit)
Zentyal in French
Zentyal in Portuguese
Zentyal in Italian
Zentyal in Russian
Zentyal in Chinese

Flags borrowed from Wikimedia.

As Ignacio announced, eBox has changed its name! Roxane explained the process of choosing a new name and Heidi has finally unveiled it. eBox Platform becomes Zentyal! Of course, we also have a new logo!

After choosing Zentyal as the new name for eBox we obviously needed a logo redesign. It had to transmit Zentyal values, already explained in previous posts, but we also wanted to keep green and orange colors.

Our designer proposed five different drafts, and choosing the definitive one was a funny process. For a week we had all the logos posted on a board, and wrote down what each logo transmitted to us. After some days of talking we reached a quorum, we had a brand new Zentyal logo!

What I most like from this logo is that it keeps the soul of eBox, but with a new identity. I think we all feel very comfortable with it. So, what do you think? I hope you like it too! Feel free to comment here or in the forum !

As Ignacio and Roxane already tipped you off in their previous posts, eBox Platform changes name and yes, now the new name is official! From the 1st of September eBox Platform will be Zentyal! We hope you like how it sounds :)!

If you read Ignacio’s post, you already know that the most important reason for changing the name of eBox Platform was that it does not correspond with what the product is and what we do. Simply put: “eBox Platform” or “eBox” suggest that the software comes in a box (server hardware, appliance…) and this is definitely not the case. eBox Platform is purely server software that comes with a cloud-based subscription services.

As Roxane described in her post, choosing the new name for eBox Platform was quite a lengthy process. Once the eBox Team rolled up their sleeves and started the search armed with a tough requirement list, we came up with over 1.000 names. Of this list, first 85, then three and eventually one name, Zentyal, was selected. So, why this name?

Well, to start with, we believe that the name Zentyal reflects better the product itself. The main aim of eBox Platform has always been and is, to make something as essential as network management easy and secure. At least to the eBox Team the word “Zentyal” transmits the qualities of Zen, such as intuition, insight, balance and coolness together with the qualities of Essential, such as easy, basic, fundamental and necessary. All pretty matching qualities for what we aim to do, I would say.

And on a side note, regarding the more practical side of the new name, we believe that Zentyal is easy to remember, easy to pronounce and short. Moreover, the word is pronounced similarly both in English and Spanish, that is a great plus ;)!

So, how many repeats does it take to get used to the new name? Well, some, but as I and the whole eBox Team believe that this was the correct decision, we feel proud and excited to start this new chapter in our story! In addition, we have pre-announced the new name already to partners and some community members and so far, we have only encountered positive comments regarding the change which is truly encouraging.

So, what do you think about it? Feel free to leave any comments to this post or in the Forum :)!

Well, at the beginning, no need to precise that we were all expecting to feel a deep heartache when time would come to find a new name for eBox Platform. But quickly, this feeling  has been replaced by the satisfaction to see our “child” growing up, becoming more consistent, developing its own personality. And, from my point of view, this is definitely how any name change should be considered: as a milestone in the history of the project we have been working on for so long.

By choosing a new name, I believe we are just helping the project to grow up, to make a new step, to help it to keep growing without denying the past. This has been a big process for the whole eBox Team, but it is important to keep in mind that the only purpose of this change is to better reflect the goals of the project as well as to customize and endow it with a name that could better reflect its innovative and amazing features we believe in.

As Ignacio already wrote in his post, the reason for changing the name of eBox Platform was first and foremostly because of the fact that There is no Box. We are not selling server hardware, eBox Platform is much more than that and people need to be aware of that. The company aims at promoting innovative software, technical support, and training services too and we felt that the new name needed to reflect better the whole range services we offer. Furthermore, the name eBox (even eBox Platform) was already used by a number of other businesses. Not to mention that we felt it was time to make the change Now or never: in a moment when the company and the project are growing and getting more and more popular, we needed a name that would reaffirm its qualities through a consistent name. Which moment would have been more appropriate for the change than when launching eBox Platform 2.0?

So the first questions when starting the process of choosing a new name have been: Which are the main goals of the project and what values we want the new name to reflect? In addition we wanted a name that would fulfill most of the following conditions: Easy to pronounce, Easy to remember, Meaningful of eBox Platform (easy, network, SMB, etc), Short, .com domain available, No similar trademark in our segment… Quite hard to fulfill all these requirements and to reach an agreement on only one or a couple of words! But I think we finally did it!

After having proposed over 1.000 names, to agree on the final winner, about 85 names were evaluated (see how creative we are!) and then we rated them with a note from 1 to 5 according to five criteria. Thus, we took into account the easiness of the name, its consistence with our positioning strategy, its availability, the lack of legal risks and finally, the easiness of the change management. Let’s just say that among the 85 candidates, we found some different inspirations: from easy-related to absurd, conceptual, sound-based, mythology-related names. In the end, we had three names in the finals (don’t count on me to reveal them…!) and after a more exhaustive analysis according to the criteria earlier mentioned, we were left with one single name that will be published next week!

After such a long process that involved all the eBox Team members, we believe that the new name is much more than a “marketing thing”: it is the spirit of the company and the project we have been defending for years! We hope that our final choice will not disappoint you and we would appreciate your support in telling the world about the new eBox Platform!

As I pre-announced in my previous post in this blog, we are planning to change the way eBox Platform is developed. During the past seven years the project has followed a classic in-house development approach, where a company (us) has taken most of the responsibility. And as eBox Platform is an open source product, it has benefited from the help of a community of users. The community contributions have been very valuable, specially when it comes to product feedback, localization, testing and debugging. And thanks to all of us, eBox Platform is becoming a real alternative to Windows Small Business Server.

However, during the last few months, quite a bunch of community members have proposed to become more involved in the project, assuming some of the responsibilities that we are doing (or should be doing) now. From the start, back in 2004, we believed this was the right approach: to take the project to a stage where the community can lead its development, a true open source product. And now we think is that moment! Of course this does not mean that we are stepping out. Quite the contrary, our involvement can only increase from now on. But we believe that more people, not just the employees of one single company, should have the chance to get involved in the project and have the right to assume responsibilities, give their opinion and help taking decisions.

So, following the spirit of the Ubuntu community teams we are launching the Localization Team, a combination of language-specific, self-governed groups which will collaborate to achieve native-quality translations of eBox Platform. This team is just the first step towards a true Ubuntu-like community, with boards governing the community and the technical development and specific teams working on particular areas.

In order to coordinate the Localization Team, we have developed an initial set of simple rules which we consider logical and positive for the organization of translation groups. The team consists of a Localization Leader, elected for two years, as well as a Language Leader and a Quality Supervisor for each language, together with any translator who wants to join a translation group. The Localization Team will coordinate through the Forum and language-specific mailing lists and will meet via IRC once every three months to establish goals and take the main decisions. None of these rules are written in stone and we will be more than happy to see groups adjusting their functioning to maximize their own efficiency. Initially Mateo Burillo, from the eBox staff, will take the lead of the Localization Team, but we hope to see soon candidates from the community interested in coordinating the whole team.

So, if you want to help in localizing eBox to your language, you just need to register in our translation platform and start posting. It is advisable to register in the general translation mailing list too, in order to coordinate with other translators. And if you consider becoming Language Leader, do not hesitate to contact Mateo Burillo (mburillo at ebox-platform dot com) so that he can set up the needed infrastructure (mail lists and such).

Feel free to leave any comments to this post or in the Forum!

I am excited to break the news on behalf of the whole eBox team: We are going to change the name of eBox Platform! And although this is positive news, the decision was not taken lightly nor it has been easy to say goodbye to our former identity and find and embrace a new one. However, we have found that this decision was necessary, and the sooner we took it the better

As you can imagine, any name change is a complex process and there should always be a very good reason to do it. So, why do we do it? Why did we think that eBox is not a good name for us anymore? Well, basically because there is no box! Although our initial idea, when we started with the project seven years ago, was to embed the software in a particular appliance and sell boxes, we soon realized that it was much more interesting to focus solely on the software and develop a well-integrated, semi-automated, versatile open source server.

But this change in our approach has lead to a growing difference between what we do and what our name means. In fact, many people are convinced that we sell boxes when they first hear about us. Only once we explain what eBox really is and what is our subscription-based value proposition, they start to become interested in the product.

We have been thinking about making the change a number of times earlier, but as you can imagine, it is never a good time for something like this. However, during the past year the number of downloads, community members and general interest in eBox Platform has started to grow exponentially and we’ve become even more painfully aware of the faults of our current name. This has made us feel that it is kind of “now or never” momentum, and that the problem will not be solved by waiting longer.

Something that we would like to stress above all, is that only the name changes. We are still the same team, with the same goals, same open source license, and same everything. In fact, we are working on increasing our commitment on open source and adopting a more community-driven development model, but I will come back with that in a different post.

The new name will be made public in a few weeks and there will be additional information regarding the change in the Planet eBox and the Forum. Feel free to leave any comments to the post or the Forum and stay tuned!

Update: it has been disclosed, the new name is Zentyal!

When developing an open source project you start to see some traction relatively soon after the first release. A few months later there come encouraging comments from enthusiastic users who soon become regular posters in the forum, mailing lists and IRC. The downloads figures and web traffic statistics start to rise, slow but steady. You start receiving contributions, appearing on magazines and blogs, seeing a word-of-mouth effect being constantly spread on twitter, receiving a flow of partnership proposals all around the world, and you start wondering “Did we really do it? Do we have a product that really solves an important problem better than any other product? Are we the best thing since sliced bread? Are we going to become really popular, like Janet Jackson after showing her boobie at the Superblow?”. And then, back to earth, the questions in mind are rather “So, how could we keep in track and reach our full potential?”.

Getting the first enthusiastic supporters and starting a word-of-mouth effect is just the beginning. Unless you try to push it somehow, it will take many years before you become a little bit known mainstream, if you ever get to that point. And when you push forward, there is still a long and exhausting road to take your project to a tipping point, after which the whole word-of-mouth process accelerates and takes traction by itself. And just bear in mind that the effort you will need to invest is very considerable and the results can only be seen in the mid-term, so you need to remain constant.

At eBox, we considered from the start that communication and promotion of our project was crucial if we ever wanted to get to a critical mass of users, and we knew that sporadic appearances in media or blogs was not enough to take us there. So, for the last 18 months we have had a full-time person in communication, which is a lot for a startup with no external funding and with strong needs in resources for R&D, service delivery and sales. There was a lot of work to do first setting up the communication basis before we could start with any visible action, but now things are up and running and we have well-established processes that can help us, for example, to start, spot and participate in discussions about eBox on the Internet.

However, having full-time professionals in communication do not generate popularity overnight. Although we had a healthy growth in all our indicators for the past 12 months (around 5-10% monthly growth in downloads, in new forum members, in incoming links, etc), we are just now really harvesting the fruits of our communication efforts. There are at least three facts that prove that eBox is becoming popular and getting closer to the tipping point:

• Linux Format, the leading Linux magazine in the UK, made a benchmark about Linux firewalls for its June 2010 issue, where it included all the best-known firewall-specific Linux distributions, and eBox. The fact that eBox was included would be just a good reason to celebrate, but it becomes better, as it was actually chosen as the best firewall solution!
• Security researcher Russ McRee found a security vulnerability in eBox during last month, which was promptly solved. Although we cannot be proud of any security vulnerability in eBox, it is definitely an important milestone that security experts start to specifically look for issues in our technology.
• The average number of eBox downloads during the past 6 months has more than doubled last year’s average. We are now close to 30,000 downloads per month, which looks like a pretty good number. Last month at LinuxTag I attended a presentation by Larry Augustin claiming that SugarCRM had 60,000 downloads per month. This means that eBox, without the $30M+ in VC funds of SugarCRM, has managed to reach almost half of their numbers. I agree the comparison is not direct: a small business server is not the same product as a CRM, but we are both aiming at the SMB server market, which makes the comparison still valid.

So, things seem to be accelerating now. In my view, there is still a lot of work to do to get to that tipping point, but we are getting closer everyday. This would be a good timing for us to reassess our identity and make sure that all our communication elements are right and in place, before any further change becomes painfully costly.

After exekias published a few days ago a post on eBox new feature: bridged mode, I also wanted to share with you the latest improvements I’ve been doing on service integration. One of the things I love about eBox is how it does, not only configure the services but can make them work together.

Modules can tell eBox which TCP/UDP ports are used, which is called Services. These services are used by the Firewall module and the Traffic Shaping module to create rules, which are automatically updated if the service changes the port configuration. ebox-webserver and ebox-jabber now register themselves on Services.

Also modules can tell the Certification Authority if they need a key pair and certificate for secure communications. This way all your services use certificates signed by the CA providing authentication and avoiding MITM attacks. ebox-jabber and ebox-radius use Service Certificates.

A new feature on the Web Server module is the SSL support and what is really exciting, you can define multiple SSL Virtual Hosts using only one IP address. How does this work ? Web Server is tightly integrated with the CA, and asks it to create a certificate with a Subject Alternative Name (known as UCC on MS Exchange) for each virtual host. Deploying all your websites with SSL is as easy as making a couple of clicks!

But we wanted to go one step further and make the Webmail module be able to automatically deploy the webmail over one of these virtual hosts, awesome isn’t it ?

That was all on service integration but I don’t want to lose the opportunity to announce that ebox-jabber has been rewritten using the new MVC framework and moving away from the old CGI and templates system. This new version changes the Jabber server, we were using jabberd2 which worked fine but didn’t have all the features we would like to see on a Unified Communications Server. ejabberd has been our choice because it’s already included in Ubuntu and gives us the power to extend this module with new features and further integration with eBox Users and Groups.

All these improvements are available on eBox 1.5 beta, you will find instructions on how to install eBox in the Installation Guide and we will be pleased to read your feedback in the Beta Testing forum.

As many of you know, recently I started to work in eBox Technologies. In this post I will show my first development for eBox Platform: Network bridged mode, now available in eBox 1.5.

But, what does bridge mode mean?

Bridging

A bridge is a way to connect two network segments, but unlike routing, in a bridge packets are forwarded at Layer 2 (Ethernet), so all protocols can go transparently through it. This is very useful if you want to insert a firewall into an already working network without reconfiguring anything (clients IP addresses nor gateway).

A typical scenario for a bridge is filtering traffic from one network segment (internal LAN) to another (Internet), for example, firewall and content filtering on web access through a HTTP proxy.

eBox as bridge

Let’s see some screenshots on how to set up a bridge using eBox. First of all we have to configure network interfaces that will be bridged. When doing this on the first interface a new bridge will be automatically created (br1).

After that all you need is to add the other interfaces to the bridge. Don’t forget to mark whether they are external or internal!

Now you can configure the bridge interface in the same way than any other interface, this process is well described in Network configuration with eBox Platform section of eBox documentation.

In general in the open source realm, and specifically regarding to subscriptions, the best known and more successful company is (not surprisingly) called Red Hat.

Red Hat has thrilled based on a business model of selling subscriptions for his Linux servers, and they explain very well the value of Red Hat Subscriptions at their corporate website, using a language mostly oriented to final customers.

In a couple of posts, I am interested in putting some light on the benefits of eBox Professional Subscriptions, but from the point of view of  the eBox Partners who sell them.

For the sake of this post extension , I will talk only about eBox Professional Subscriptions, as Enterprise Subscriptions offer a different (and extra) value to partners. Then, from our website:

eBox Professional Subscription is intended for use in production environments in small and medium businesses. The subscription comes with a full version of the eBox Platform software and it includes Quality Assured software updates, guaranteed by eBox Technologies.

Furthermore, the Professional Subscription includes access to Virtual CIO that provides alerts on hardware functioning, network events, service availability and Internet connection, as well as weekly/monthly reports on the overall performance of the network and services, inventory on installed and active services and regular security audits on the system.

Quality software updates combined with Virtual CIO imply a couple of very straight forward values for partners:

• Security. The subscribed machines will have QA updates, meaning that eBox Technologies tests the patches and bugfixes internally and release them in its own repository, certifying that they won’t cause any problem. Therefore, the software installed at their customers just works, and it is automatically updated without any hassle for partners.
• Client loyalty. Additionally, partners will have all the diagnosis tools of the Virtual CIO (see above) and the possibility to contract 3rd level support from eBox. Reports and alerts, automatically generated, allow partners both to keep the servers up and justify the service given to customers without extra effort.

A consequence of security and client loyalty is more income with less effort for partners:

• Cash flow & low workload for the partner: Instead of charging a big amount of money per license (Microsoft model), eBox focuses on charging small annual fees to managed clients’ servers, sharing the benefits with the partner with very reduced (or zero) extra workload for them.

eBox certified Partners keep selling their own services for consultancy, deployment and technical support (the latest optionally backed by eBox), but with a complement for increasing security and and client loyalty, in form of eBox Professional Subscriptions.

I remind a conversation with Marten Mickos, recently named CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, about building a VAR channel, a year ago (during the Innovate Europe! 2009, which eBox was one of the ten finalists). Marten was our mentors there, he told us loud and clear that building a VAR channel was hard, really hard.

Marten, you were so right! After working on eBox partner program during the whole 2009 Summer, eBox signed its first 3 official partners on September 2009. 9 months and over 200 partners worldwide petitions later, we have evolved our partner program to a more easy to understand and customer-oriented one.

From a DIY services offering based only on 3rd level technical support, to a server and on-line services subscriptions one, with public prices and growing discounts for partners depending on partnership levels (well known Bronze, Silver and Gold). More simple and packaged seem to be better.

Having certified and signed more than 20 so far, with ten currently in the certification process, during June we are reaching the 30 certified partners mark. All of our certified partners employ from 1 to 3 eBox certified technicians, who have completed the on-line course “eBox for network administrators”.

On the other hand, surprisingly, over 30% of the +200 companies that have requested us for partnership stated they were selling eBox already somehow, shaping a rich ecosystem of officially certified and non certified eBox providers. The more options, the best for our clients and community… The complexity of open source ecosystems is so complex as fascinating .

Still struggling to build a worldwide eBox VAR channel, we keep evolving our products and services to make them more simple to understand, sell, deploy and manage.

Marten’s MySQL lasted not less than 3 years to build a credible VAR channel, let’s see where we are able to reach in 9 months from now. Stay tunned.

Exactly 6 months ago, November 18th, I wrote a post with the title “2.000 users registered in the eBox forum”. If you read it, you will find the following sentence:

“[...] We hope to reach 3.000 members in the following 6 months [...]“

And guess what, today, exactly 6 months later, May 18th, we have reached 3.000 users registered in the eBox forum… Should I try now guessing the lottery numbers?

However, I am afraid the 2.000 number given 6 months ago was not precise, by then we haven’t found out how many (SEO and the like) spammers  were hidden among our real registered users.

We did an important cleaning during December, and we kept continuously doing it since then. Therefore, our current +3.000 users are for real.

In the medium term, as soon as the forum software we are based on (SMF from Simple Machines) releases its new version, a revamped SMF 2.0, we will migrate and install some extra plugins to keep spammers out, or at least put it more difficult to them.

On the other hand, would any of you guess when the eBox Forum will reach 4.000 registered members?

As my few readers may already know, this week we released a new eBox 1.4-2 installer. Although it contains new exciting features like the support for delay pools in squid, that allows to configure bandwidth throttling together with transparent proxy, the real work that I want to emphasize is in the amount of bugfixing we have done.

I think that eBox 1.4 was a pretty stable release since the beginning, but as you know, the community always helps to find issues for some specific corner cases and I want to thank all of them because we really appreciate their work in helping to make eBox a better product every day. Anyway, let me tell you a short story about the samba module (probably one of the most popular modules in eBox) in this 1.4 release.

One of the starred features in 1.4 was the support for Windows 7 clients and we added it by including a new backported version of the samba package (3.4.5). Unfortunately this version had a bug in the full_audit feature, that is required to make the samba logs work, so if full_audit was enabled, the samba module didn’t work at all. Therefore we had to do a sacrifice and temporary disable that feature to include the Windows 7 support which demand was in constant increase.

Later, samba 3.4.6 was released and according to its changelog the full_audit problem was fixed, so after backporting it and making some successful tests we uploaded the new samba package and also a new version of ebox-samba to the 1.4-proposed repository enabling the logs again. Few days later people started reporting that in some cases (only when trying to directly open or create a file instead of copying or moving it) the file sharing feature was broken after the upgrade. We only could give them a temporary workaround (manually disabling the full_audit feature again). Then we hoped to find this bug fixed in the next samba release, but it wasn’t.

So we did more research and finally we found a very simple patch in the samba bugzilla, so we applied it to our backported samba version and uploaded the new package, that has been also included in the new 1.4-2 version. As we have not received any further reports regarding this issue, it seems that we can finally have Windows 7 support and logs working together! Improvements like this, made with the help of eBox users, make us to improve eBox day after day and we’re truly excited seeing how the project is shaping up!

Much time has gone since my last post, being the release of eBox Platform 1.4 and our (since yesterday) on-line store two of the latest and most interesting news.

eBox Platform 1.4 release has been a great step forward, more than 20.000 downloads in less than a couple of weeks are a clear evidence of the interest arisen. The huge increase of visits to our websites, partnership and support requests are the outcome.

On the other hand, our on-line store is bundled with the release of 2 new products we have been testing for the last 2 months: eBox  backup storage and eBox VoIP cheap calls.

As a consequence, eBox portfolio has growth and gained visibility, we are selling directly to our installed base and to and through our partner network.

First, we are offering directly to eBox’s users:

1. Technical support, one-time eBox support and safe migration from 1.2 to 1.4 support.
2. Subscription services, such as eBox backup storage, eBox VoIP prepaid credit and eBox Control Center.
3. Our first book “eBox for network administrators”! (only in Spanish currently though)

Tech support offered directly to eBox’s installed base is two fold: on the hand, helping SOHO users to solve punctual issues and doubts; on the other hand, assist companies on real-time to migrate from the good 1.2 to the great 1.4.

eBox backup storage is for those SOHO and SMEs which desire to keep their data safe off-site at a low price, and eBox VoIP is for those interested in making  abroad and international calls at very cheap rates, from their desktop using a softphone.

eBox Control Center gives the possibility to those companies with a number of deployments (e.g. several branches) the ability to monitor and administer their eBox Platform servers from a simple web interface.

Secondly, we are offering to and through our partners network:

1. To our partners: certified training, 3rd level technical support and eBox Control Center subscriptions.
2. Through our partners to their clients: eBox backup storage and eBox VoIP credit.

The certified training warranties both the partner and his customers a quality service by a qualified technician. 3rd level technical support brings them eBox developers on when required (issues, complex configurations). eBox Control Center provides our partners with a web easy-to-use and simple tool to monitor and administer their eBox Platform deployments.

eBox backup storage and VoIP credit grants our partners a recurrent revenue, while growing their portfolio within a win-win relation.

Our portfolio will include new SaaS products bundled to eBox Platform, but in the meanwhile we have tailored an offering for every eBox user, whether big or small. Compelling enough?

< borrowed from Wikipedia >Disruptive technologies are innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced (”low-end disruption”) or designed for a different set of consumers (”new-market disruption”). Disruptive technologies are particularly threatening to the leaders of an existing market, because they are competition coming from an unexpected direction.

In low-end disruption, the disruptor is focused initially on serving the least profitable customer, who is happy with a good enough product. This type of customer is not willing to pay premium for enhancements in product functionality. Once the disruptor has gained foot hold in this customer segment, it seeks to improve its profit margin. To get higher profit margins, the disruptor needs to enter the segment where the customer is willing to pay a little more for higher quality. To ensure this quality in its product, the disruptor needs to innovate. The incumbent will not do much to retain its share in a not so profitable segment, and will move up-market and focus on its more attractive customers. After a number of such encounters, the incumbent is squeezed into smaller markets than it was previously serving. And then finally the disruptive technology meets the demands of the most profitable segment and drives the established company out of the market. An example of low-end disruption is the way digital photography has largely replaced film photography.</ borrowed from Wikipedia>

No market is shielded against disruptive technologies, and the market of SMB servers is no exception. In fact, it shows all the conditions for such a disruption to happen, as it is a market in which:

• There is a clear leader (Microsoft)
• With a mature product (Windows Small Business Server)
• Over-provisioned product, providing more functionality than needed and overwhelming end users by the plethora of features
• Established on a continuous, evolutionary innovation cycle
• With little or no commercial interest in the lower segments of the market (WsSBS has no product or pricing segmentation for customers under 75 employees)
• With a strong motivation in abandoning the less profitable customers and focus in the more profitable ones (rising the license price by 80% is forcing customers in the low-end to look for alternatives)

Moreover, Linux and the open source tools for network management (Samba, Postfix, Squid, Snort, eGroupware, Spamassasin, ClamAV, etc) have a huge disruptive potential in the SMB server market, as they bring a great advantage in pricing (in fact, they are free). Besides, similarly to other disruptive technologies, they started offering a lower level of functionality than their closed source alternatives, but they have evolved and caught up or even surpassed them in many markets (close to 90% of the supercomputers in the world are based on Linux, which is a good indicator of the quality level this technology has reached).

However, in spite of these conditions, open source solutions have a very low presence in the market of SMB servers. The reason is simple: for a server solution to enter the SMBs, it needs all its components to be tightly integrated and be easy to administrate. SMBs do not have resources nor time to deploy complex high-performance solutions, so highly integrated products such as WsSBS cover pretty well SMBs’ technological needs.

This is where solutions such as eBox Platform, developed after the integration of standard open source components, have the required disruptive potential to change the market balance. On the other hand, as the software integrating these components is also open source, there are additional advantages, both in development costs (users community greatly helps reducing the effort needed for design, development and testing) and in sales and promotion costs (due to the word-of-mouth effect generated by the community and the option to try the product without previously paying for it). Thanks to this, it is possible to compete with the market leader with a lower cost structure, turning thus the market of lower-end customers profitable.

Finally, as it is not possible to use a traditional license-based business model, there is need to be innovative in the value proposition and bring it closer to customer’s needs. For us the solution came in the form of SaaS model (access to the eBox Control Center, offered mainly for VARs and MSPs) and subscription services (disaster recovery, cheap VoIP calls, security audits, reports and alerts, etc), which are not offered by the market leader.

In summary, the key points to disrupt the market of SMB servers are:

• Focus the product initially in the lower-end of the market, to later improve in functionality and start growing in the market stack
• Center the innovation effort in improving system integration and task automation, as well as usability and easiness of administration
• Use open source methodologies for development, distribution and commercialization of the product, generating a user community around the project
• Develop the value proposition in technologies and services that allow for a better convenience of use, such as SaaS or subscription to remote services

After seven months of the 0.6 release, ANSTE 0.7 is finally out. The project has been a bit abandoned because I have been very busy working on eBox.

Some of the new features were implemented time ago, but I was waiting for a big one for the new release, and precisely my work at eBox Technologies has brought me the opportunity to do it.  We are adding multi-gateway support to eBox with DHCP and PPPoE interfaces (currently it only supported it with static ones).

With this feature implemented eBox will take a big step forward to become the reference in the open source small business server market.

Now ANSTE is capable of easily simulate DHCP and PPPoE routers, this way we can automatize all the testing of the new features.

Here is the complete list of new features and fixes:

• Added new router types with dhcp and pppoe
• Added user-extensions and single-window settings for Selenium
• Now -wait-fail option gives the opportunity of retry a test
• Added new protocol and firefox-profile settings for Selenium
• Added precondition attributes (var and eq) to <host> test elements
• Added <precondition> element to include <test> and <host> only if
  condition is satisfied
• Bugfix: use flock for allowing only one instance of anste
• Added name of the user that executed ANSTE on the HTML report
• Bugfix: missing HTML report generation time
• Added scripts executed to the test results

You can get the anste package from the usual repository:

deb http://people.warp.es/~josh/debian ./

As you can read in the official press note, today is the 4th anniversary of eBox Platform as a open source project. What a coincidence, just two days ago was my first year anniversary as an employee at eBox Technologies, the company that supports the eBox development and offers all the professional services related to it.

The experience of an entire year working with the rest of the eBox team has been very positive. In this last year eBox has improved a lot and I’m very proud of being part of it. In fact, I started to work with part of the current eBox team during the spring of 2007, while I was doing developing ANSTE project, specially designed for the automatization of the integration tests of eBox Platform. But now, with a company fully backing eBox development, I believe it is our opportunity to make eBox the best Linux Small Business Server and the first viable open source alternative to Windows SBS.

I don’t want to finish this post without giving thanks to all the people that has contributed to eBox or used it during these four years. This has been a great year but I’m sure the next ones will be even better. And don’t forget to stay tuned for the 1.4 release that will be out just in a couple of months from now!

On a day like this four years ago eBox Platform was first published as open source. Anniversaries such as this one are good chances to stop for a moment and look back to how everything started.

Before open-sourcing eBox code we had been working in it for some 20 months already, since before summer 2004. Originally the whole idea of eBox came up as a joint-project between DBS (now defunct) and Warp in order to develop an open source server to offer small and medium businesses all the functionality needed to run their computer networks and network infrastructure. The stress was put in simplicity and usability, as most small businesses do not have an IT expert nor the time to set complex systems up.

After some work we quickly realized that a Webmin approach of developing just a web interface on top of a Linux system could work fine for a single network service but it lacked the service integration required for an easy-to-use, all-in-one solution. That’s where we started developing eBox as an integration framework, an abstraction layer that could turn a bunch of independent network components into a single entity. A kind of “glue” for network services in a Linux server. It was a beautiful idea, though challenging and complex, and no one before had proposed it.

The initial business model that was conceived for eBox was to bundle it in a specific hardware (a box) and sell it like hot cakes. Hence its name “eBox”. Clever, eh? Well, the amount of work needed to develop it turned out to be much greater than expected and we did not have enough resources to fund such an adventure and its market introduction, so we turned to search for public funding.

Our initial idea had always been to make eBox open source so we organized an event at the Chamber of Commerce of Zaragoza to give solemnity to the moment (in those times open source was in fashion among the public sector, but cases of businesses open sourcing their products were really scarce). We got over a hundred attendants, including some of the most important local politicians and IT entrepreneurs, and initial interest on eBox was pretty high, at least in the local context. However, this interest faded away during the following months and it was not until October 2006, almost a year after its publication, that eBox downloads started to take off, climbing to 2,000 from a meager 500 the month before.

It is really gratifying to see how long we have gone since the kick-off of the project and since we started with the development of the community. Now, with more than 2,000 members in our community and 150 new members every month we are becoming a well-established solution in the open source market and we can soon fulfill our goal of becoming the Linux Small Business Server.

Since I came back from Dublin I had pending to release the new ebox-radius module. This new module for eBox Platform 1.2 brings integration of eBox LDAP users with FreeRADIUS allowing the deployment of WPA/WPA2 EAP wireless authentication using eBox. In fact is very simple as seen on the screenshot, you can choose whether all the users are able authenticate or just a group of them and the NAS clients that can query the RADIUS server.

ebox-radius

This module is still in beta, but packages for Hardy are available from my PPA so you can try it in your eBox 1.2, a version for eBox 1.3 will be released very soon. FreeRADIUS packages where self builded because of #266299, I hope this can be fixed very soon, see Debian, EAP, and the OpenSSL and GPL incompatibility.

If you give it a try, please give us feedback on the forum or the mailing lists.

As of today, November 18th, eBox forum has reached the number of 2,000 users registered.

2.000 members is not a small amount for a Linux small business server such as eBox Platform. It’s more impressive if you know how the numbers have evolved lately though.

The eBox forum was originally set up in May 2007, more than 2 years and half ago. However, 58% of the users registered during 2009 only, and 30% in the last 4 months and a half, since we released eBox 1.2.

Whether as Gateway, UTM, Infrastructure manager, Office Server or Unified Communication Server, it’s good to know than eBox Platform has become one of the most used server-side  products out there.

We hope to reach 3.000 members in the following 6 months, or even less if we have into account the number of improvements and new features already being tested for eBox 1.4:  Active Directory sync, remote backup, webmail, support for Master-Slave LDAP, PPPoE support, usability enhancements, …

The bigger is our community, the better will become eBox Platform, and also faster.

My sincere thanks to all our eBox community members!

Yeah, after cauterized.net crash I’ll be back soon with yet an other blog, try 3.

October has been a good month for records, our community is growing fast.

Last month, 163 users have enrolled in our forum, the main site for sharing ideas about the future of eBox Platform and getting free (as in beer) support.

eBox forum will reach 2.000 registered users before December. As of today, we are more than 1.900, from which 725 came in the last 6 months.

Directly from the stats section of the forum, 2009 October’s records:

• 163 new users registered. An impressive 21,6% growth compared to the last top: 134 in September.
• 184 new topics and 931 posts. 167 topics and 773 posts were the former highest, reached in May.

Another record is related to the number of downloads for the eBox 1.2 iso, more that 8.300 during October from the new Sourceforge repository.  Another 20% increase compared to September less than 7.000.

Worth to say that those downloads don’t take into account our under development unstable release eBox 1.3, only for installation through packages, neither eBox deployments from Ubuntu repositories.

Therefore, both new users registered in eBox forum and the number of downloads of our eBox 1.2 iso have grown ~20% in the last month, compared to the former one. It seems to point out we are in the right path.

A few weeks ago I was playing with statistical data from eBox forum, trying to find some behavior pattern and to understand a bit better its dynamics. I tried in particular a couple of well-know principles applied to businesses:

• The Pareto principle, stating that 20% of your customers are behind 80% of your revenues
• The Long Tail distribution, described by Chris Anderson, stating that in an Internet-based business, sales tend toward a long tail graph

Well, as I wanted to see how well these two principles were applied to our community, I just had to change customers with forum members and sales with posts in the forum. The results were really surprising. I was expecting some correlation with the previous principles, but I found out that the behavior was exactly as predicted by the business principles. Here you can see the graph of our long-tailed community (data are freely available at our forum statistics).

So far, it was qualitatively well understood that in every open source community there is a core of very active members and a bulk of sporadic contributors. However, these results can give some quantitative and visual insights on this behavior. I believe they can be applied to other communities and I would love to hear of other examples where these principles work.

When I explain the benefits that a business can get from open sourcing a product, the contributions from the community in the technical aspect are well understood and accepted. But when I get to the point of sales leads and opportunities, the reactions are often skeptical. So far I could only come up with examples of other products and companies with just vague descriptions of the benefits in their sales process. Even when I tried to find more convincing figures I just could gather some more vague data.

Well, I finally have some real figures from our own product and company which I think are self-explanatory and I would like to share them as a snapshot of our current situation. My goal is that they could serve as a graphical example of how using an open source approach can help a start up increasing its sales and commercial opportunities. But first I need to explain a little background …

Our main market focus is through partners and resellers who can deliver eBox certified services locally, so for us a commercial opportunity is a system integrator or a managed service provider who contacts us interested in a partnership agreement.

It’s been less than three months since we launched our partnership program and the results so far are the following:

• We have received 50+ partner requests from 30 countries in every continent in the world, except Antarctica
• We have already signed up with close to 10 of them
• More importantly, over 80% of our partner requests have tested and deployed eBox in production environments, half of them at their customers’ premises, before contacting us, showing the value of allowing free download of your own product
• Surprisingly, one in every six is a member of our community, which shows that open source communities are not just “non-paying users”

Having this data would have been very useful for me some 5-6 years ago, when I had to do a lot of open source evangelizing. I hope they can be useful for someone else now.

Being eBox Platform the main product of our company, the title of this post could be just a nice play on words…

However, reading on the open source and business model debate, from Stephen Walli’s to Mat Assay’s blogs, I believe I got to something interesting around eBox Platform as a platform, despite of (please forgive) the repetition.

From the latter, Mat Assay’s “Product management goes open source”:

[...] We were so busy marketing our vision that we almost missed listening to our users’ vision(s) [...]

[...] open-source companies, if they listen to their users, are well-positioned to build platforms that can become the lifeblood of enterprise IT [...]

If you ask me which is the eBox’s vision, I would speak about our perspective instead: eBox Technologies and eBox Platform desire to be for Linux in the server, what Canonical and Ubuntu have been for Linux in the desktop.

And the key point is: how are we building it?… Listening to our users and clients (our partners), so supporting them to develop their business using eBox as a Platform.

Not by chance, eBox Technologies is a 100% partner-focused company. Not by chance, our partner program puts the stress on flexibility, strongly encouraging our partners to develop their own value on top of eBox, even building eBox based products to be re-branded. Mixed, combined or pure, but always flexible.

Whether a mini data-center, a security/VPN appliance, or a micro home sever; eBox is being customized and combined to fit in every hole… Because marketing such a horizontal product would be much difficult without partners which struggle for their picked niches with self adapted tools.

It’s not a new business model neither a brand new strategy, but just a(nother) way to explain Ebox’s perspective.

Paraphrasing both Stephen and Matt blogs, I feel like “in the open road, once more unto the breach”.

I was used to think that in the open source world, business and community were always separated, that it was a bad idea to mix both worlds. That was the reason why I tried not to interact much with eBox community. Perhaps ill-advised, I thought that there was a natural mistrust in community members for everyone bearing a CEO title and talking business stuff. That was my main line of thought … until last week.

We got to a point where we needed to gather better information about how eBox is used, so I decided that we had nothing to lose if we asked our community. I prepared a poll in the forum and asked the members about the most critical environment in which they had deployed eBox. Not only I got a high number of votes (around 10% of all the members of the community in less than a week) but also a lot of replies specifying the environments eBox has been deployed, its functionalities, the best features of eBox and what should be included in our roadmap.

Moreover, it seems the information gathered was not only useful for us but also for the community itself, as a new poll was launched (thanks Elliot!) asking about the most important services in eBox. The results were not only extremely interesting, but also the subsequent debate and thoughtful analysis (thanks Sam Granf and SamK!).

I don’t think business people should be kept out of interacting with the community. Engaging in an open and honest conversation will be very gratifying and rewarding and it will favor community-driven development at all levels.

Having a great product is not enough to make business, everyone who has run a company knows that. If they don’t see you, you don’t exist. Since our company web site showed up a couple of months ago, the number of qualified leads (potential qualified partners) has been growing up steadily.

Geographically, they are coming mainly from US and Spain, although they are other countries such as Italy and Brazil catching up fast. Surprisingly, A company from Mauritius has been the last one in filling up our “become a partner” form…

Having in mind the where the visits to our websites -both eBox Platform and eBox Technologies- come from, Germany is missing despite of being the third country in number of visitors, very close to US (first) and Spain (second). I am puzzled, why don’t we have any VAR or MSP from Germany knocking in our door yet?.

Anyway, things are going quite well. In the next few weeks we are going to make public the list with the first authorized eBox partners, both Service and Training, from countries such as US, Spain, Mexico or Singapur.

Having in mind than we just sign partners who show real commitment -say, those which are able to offer a superb quality service-, and the time we employ with them to define and develop their business plan with eBox, we should reach the number of 15-20 partners during the next 16 weeks.

Looking at the map and how (geographically) diverse is the people who approach us it’s really motivating. More partners and more diversity, more fun.

And I should be taking the coach to the Dublin Airport in half an hour … but still packing !