Socialtext plans to open source more than 80 percent of its software, the company announced Wednesday. The U.S. startup specializes in software and support for enterprises looking to set up their own internal wikis and Web logs.
The wiki concept of "open editing" is used in Web sites like free-content encyclopedia Wikipedia where anyone accessing the site can create, edit or annotate its Web pages.
Since its founding in late 2002, Socialtext has built its business around selling and supporting commercial software extensions to the open-source Kwiki wiki framework for corporate users, according to Ross Mayfield, Socialtext chief executive officer and co-founder. In the future, Socialtext will derive its revenue from professional services, he said in a recent phone interview. What Socialtext is planning is very similar to the approach already adopted by SugarCRM, an open-source provider of customer relationship management software, Mayfield said.
The first Socialtext product to go open source is Wikiwyg, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get wiki editing tool, with more to follow, according to Mayfield. The company launched Wikiwyg in late August. The software is currently available for download from its own Web site -- www.wikiwyg.net. As more Socialtext software goes open source, the company plans to put downloads and demos on its Socialtext Web site, Mayfield said.
Going open source should mean that more customers will try out Socialtext's software since they can download it, experiment and do pilot applications with it without having to make any formal license commitment, he said.
Socialtext has more than 200 customers worldwide, according to Mayfield. They include Europe-based investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Eastman Kodak's Ofoto unit, Nokia and Symantec.
Typically, wiki use within an enterprise starts "deep in the bowels of the IT department," Mayfield said. Over time, the software is used to facilitate the successful sharing of information on specific projects and eventually executives pick up on the technology and opt to take it company wide. He said Socialtext customers report accelerated project cycles by as much as 25 percent and a decrease in e-mail volumes by around one third. An additional benefit is that wikis lend themselves to the kind of audit trails mandated by regulatory compliance since every single edit to any given document is stored, Mayfield said. "You can see who did what," he added.
"Typical collaboration software [like groupware] breaks down at 150 people," Mayfield said, whereas wikis can support a much larger audience. Publishing a message in the wiki environment as a Web page may be a much more efficient way of disseminating information for a large group of people than a mass e-mailing, which may get lost in users' in-boxes, he pointed out. While analysts like Gartner Inc. suggest 30 percent of corporate e-mail is "occupational spam, Wiki is spam-free," Mayfield said.
The key benefit of the wikiworld as opposed to some more traditional groupware applications like IBM's Lotus Notes and Microsoft's Exchange is that it is immediately familiar to people. "You don't have to know HTML, you just have to know how to type in [a word processor like ] Microsoft Word," he said.
In terms of how staff should use wikis, many of those issues have already been solved, according to Mayfield. "Most of the policy issues re: Web logs and wikis were worked out when companies adopted e-mail," he said.
Last week, Socialtext announced that SAP Ventures, the venture capital arm of German enterprise applications vendor SAP, was one of the contributors to its Series B round of financing.