Industry’s First Community Engagement Platform for Commercial Open Source

The business of commercial open source (COS) relies on extending the “participation and trust” established in vibrant open source communities to the sponsoring COS company via their open source developer environment. The transition from open source project to a COS company with a participatory community is challenging and requires a superset of traditional collaborative software development, partner co-development, open source development as well as commercially-aware community management and dynamic commerce capabilities.

Currently available Open Source Community Platforms are primarily collaborative software development (CSD) environments with community and commerce features thrown in as an afterthought. As such, they do not meet the requirements of commercial open source companies. This has forced many COS companies to adapt and settle for available CSD environments or to roll their own environment at significant investment and with less than desirable results.


True COS Platform

Essentia delivers ESP, the industry’s first COS community engagement platform, to efficiently build and manage vibrant communities that drive strong business for commercial open source companies. ESP is a modern architecture that is a generational leap over open source platforms hosting communities today, that were conceived 8-10 years ago when commercial open source was a only a dream. ESP is built on a leading-edge technology framework and tools with open source, commercial, and proprietary technologies.



EssentiaESP Features

The Essentia Environment facilitates collaborative commercial open source development with a secure environment that unifies software development, communication, social networking, content management, community management, commerce, CRM integrations, and analytics and tracking. Access to the system is controlled via a centralized roles and permissions system. The Essentia Environment consists of:

• Collaborative development tools for version control, issue tracking, and file release

• Communication tools for document sharing, wiki, blogs, news, and mailing lists

• Social networking tools for discussions, user communication, surveys, and tagging

• Site and project level content management

• Advanced banners, commerce, and dynamic cataloging

• Marketing and tracking tool integration with customizable tracking codes

• Centralized, robust framework

• Unique Ecosystem Enablement for rapid community on-boarding




Developed with COS Leaders

ESP is being developed in close partnership with JasperSoft, the makers of JasperReports with three million downloads and 70,000 registered users, and blends capabilities needed for open source software development, social networking, and online commerce. Community management best practices for commercial open source have shaped the foundational processes that are natively supported by the platform.