Our History
Where we’ve been.
The GeoServer project began in 2001, under the umbrella of OpenPlans, as a tool for community planning. However, as GeoServer matured it became clear that there was a larger role for open source software to play in making government and other data more accessible.
Each year, more people were using GeoServer, and the number of customers coming in with paid work for GeoServer development increased. The Open Planning Project invested in the software while also taking paid contracts to improve or modify it in directions that clients want. In the beginning, OpenPlans invested on a small scale basis, with no more than two or three people working on GeoServer full-time.
About a year and half ago, the growth of users lead to consistent contracts that helped the team nearly achieve its goal of full cost recovery. Mark Gorton, the founder of The Open Planning Project and our generous investor, got excited about GeoServer’s potential and told us to hire more.
We protested – we were just about to hit our goal of “self-sustainability”. But Mark replied that growth would make us more sustainable in the long run. We had no good response for Mark, as he’s right – a more rounded organization with consistent revenue streams is definitely more sustainable than a handful of guys chasing contracts.
So grow we did. Since 2007, the team has grown from three people to fourteen, and in the first half of the year came close to full cost recovery. We expanded the GeoServer team and started to invest heavily in the OpenLayers web map. We added team members to integrate the GeoWebCache accelerator and the PostGIS spatial database.
Where we are now.
We are changing our business model, shifting from a series of service contracts to an Enterprise support model. We’ve rebranded ourselves as OpenGeo – the new name makes it clear we are an open source business. Our plan is to flip the traditional view of open source on its head, making OpenGeo a premium brand. Our solutions are built by the true experts, and have a higher level of support and flexibility than proprietary alternatives.
Our software is as good as and better than the proprietary software of our competitors. With an Enterprise contract, our clients get a level of access to core developers rarely available. Our core product is the “OpenGeo Suite”, the best of breed open source software that we contribute heavily to, ensuring that it all works together.
With zero paid advertising, PR or marketing, we already have secured four great GeoServer Enterprise clients:
- Portland’s TriMet (their main public transit agency)
- MassGIS (the central GIS agency of the state of Massachusetts)
- the information centre of the Ministry of agriculture and forestry in Finland (TIKE); and,
- a UN organization which wishes to remain unnamed.
In addition, we’ve done client work for Google, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Landgate in Australia, Alachua County, and many more.
Where we are going.
This year we are concentrating on building our business backbone:
- bringing in sales and marketing experts;
- recruiting project managers;
- adding senior project leaders to our staff.
We will be exhibiting at key conferences, working to increase our public profile as an open source geospatial company, and bringing the OpenGeo Suite to market as a complete product offering.
Timeline
- 2001: GeoServer project starts as a one-man (Rob Hranac) development project.
- 2002: GeoServer joins the GeoTools community and adds a second developer (Chris Holmes).
- 2003: The Open Geospatial Consortium names GeoServer the Reference Implementation of the WFS specification, complete compliance brings the GeoServer 1.0 release.
- 2004: A collaboration of contributors brings WMS capabilities and a Web Administration GUI to GeoServer
- 2006: OpenPlans starts working to bring in contracts on GeoServer, around the development team of Justin Deoliveira and Andrea Aime.
- Early 2007: The geospatial team at OpenPlans approaches full cost recovery
- Summer 2007: Tim Schaub, core contributor to OpenLayers, joins the team, adding the capability to do mapping javascript work
- Fall 2007: A growth spurt brings an additional 5 developers to the team.
- Winter 2008: GeoWebCache expands on JTileCache to become the third OpenGeo project.
- Spring 2008: The geospatial team gets re-branded as “OpenGeo”, to fully develop the open source stack and bring a coherent presence to our work
- Winter 2009: Paul Ramsey joins OpenGeo, bringing PostGIS in to the fold of the OpenGeo Suite