1. How did you get started?

The idea of founding a consultancy company specialized on open source technologies came from six guys which were probable the best Linux experts and most active open source advocates in the region. A year before, I had left a good job in Finland to try to start the same kind of company in Zaragoza, so when they asked me to join in as the non-geek member of the team I could not resist.

Before founding Warp we applied to become a part of CEEI, which is a incubator for innovative companies funded by the regional government and which gives some grants and support for its members. On the other hand, we started the development of our own product eBox together with another company in the region, DBS (this company has recently closed down). The deal was simple: we did the work, they funded the direct costs.

With these two sources of funding and a main competitive advantage (we were and still are the only open source based company in the region) we could start looking for customers and projects. A lot of work and really tiny
salaries for several months and Warp was launched.

2. What is your product?

eBox Platform is a user-friendly Linux server. It is focused on managing corporate networks with the simplicity of an appliance server and the flexibility of a Debian Linux. It is the server that Canonical would build
for the SMEs segment (actually, they have plans to build a server for SMEs and I have heard they are watching eBox very carefully).

So far, eBox is still under development, with our 1.0 first stable version expected for September 2007, when we will start offering professional services on top of it. Our community is also growing pretty fast, with more
than 22,000 downloads, an average 10% monthly growth and almost 180 active members in the community.

3. Key milestones?

Milestone 0 would be the foundation of Warp in September 2004 and the start of our business. The first real milestone was the release of eBox 0.7 under GPL in December 2005. After that moment our agreement with DBS ended and we needed to look for other sources of funding if we wanted to continue with eBox, so we approached CDTI, an organization dependant on the Spanish Ministry of Industry which funds innovative start-ups.

The second milestone was May 2006, when we participated at Innovate!Europe Conference presenting eBox. The marketing and promotion we got locally was so huge that the perception the market had about us shifted from “just a bunch of geeks taking about communist stuff” to “a young innovative company that gets international recognition”. A few months later we were flooded with projects, and we have been like that since, even we have been growing quite fast.

The third milestone was in July 2006, when the CDTI accepted our proposal and granted us the funds we needed to complete eBox 1.0. Moreover, after that we are officially considered one of the most innovative companies in Spain, which has opened many unexpected doors and has put our name in some of the circles of power in the country.

And hopefully the fourth milestone will be in September 2007, when we release eBox 1.0

4. Why did you decide on the open source model?

It was the natural model for us, considering our background and that we sell ourselves as open source experts. On the other hand, I don’t know how we could have had eBox as popular as it is now (getting feedback from people at the One Laptop Per Child project, for example), got it translated into a dozen languages by volunteers, had it thoroughfully market-tested before launching the business, got several partnership proposals before having the first stable version, …with virtually no budget for marketing and communication.

5. How do you see Warp / Ebox in 5 years?

Difficult question. Five years is a really long time in our industry and it is particularly long for a company that did not celebrate yet its third anniversary.

I like to think about Warp in a few years as a well established player in the open source sector in Spain, attracting good talent and launching innovative projects that could become promising products in their niches, just like we
are doing with eBox.

And about eBox, I think we have a good chance to make it a very popular professional product. We still have to see whether we succeed in giving great value both to the community and the market at the same time, and if we manage to make it grow both in users and in business.

6. Some comments on Open Source and Spain

The community movement in Spain has always been very strong, and some regions have been global pioneers in implementing policies in favor of open source, but the private sector has been quite conservative so far. Even among the start-ups it is hard to find a real open source mentality and, oddly enough, the few ones that exist are not usually in the traditional hubs of innovation (Madrid and Barcelona), but in peripherical regions such as Aragon, Galicia, Andalucia, …

Tämän lisäksi tulemme vierailemaan mm. Linux Foundationissa sekä Googlen pääkonttorilla.

Otan mielelläni ehdotuksia vastaan kysymyksistä mitä kannattaisi esittää ja tulen kirjoittamaan ainakin osaan nistä vastauksia tässä blogissa.