Growing Business

The June issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "Growing Business" and the authors include:

Tony Bailetti, Director of Ontario's Talent First Network, discusses a novel strategy for growing the revenue of technology companies and startups through active participation in a business ecosystem. He introduces a blueprint to grow revenue, an inventory of growth formulas, and briefly defines business ecosystems, keystones and platforms. He then describes the business ecosystem approach to grow revenue, comparing it to traditional approaches and identifying when the business ecosystem approach works better, as well as the benefits and risks of implementing the business ecosystem approach. He highlights the differences between business ecosystems and development communities and outsourcing.

Mekki MacAulay, Principal of OSStrategy.org, outlines seven strategies that use open source to grow revenue and provides examples of successful implementations for each.

Tomas Marko, a researcher for Lead to Win, describes the challenges that entrepreneurs in startup companies must overcome in order to grow successfully. He examines both the risks and benefits of growth as well as the importance of short and long term strategic planning.

Ram Mohan, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Afilias, tells the story behind Afilias' continuous growth and the open source product and community that were leveraged to support it. His article also examines the importance of partnering with and actively contributing to an open source project to support the growth of both the project and the company.

Tarus Balog, CEO of The OpenNMS Group, answers a question frequently asked of open source proponents: namely, how to make money with open source. He describes the successful model used by the OpenNMS Group to generate sustainable revenue for growth, while focusing on open source.

The editorial theme for the upcoming July issue of the OSBR is "Go to Market" and the guest editor will be Corien Kershey. Submissions are due by June 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.