Thursday, April 3, 2008

Open-source software as guerrilla marketing strategy

SAN FRANCISCO--Chances are if you're running a commercial open-source company, Google is one of your best friends.

That's because a search on Google for "open source and (whatever company X sells)" can yield the largest volume of referrals to an upstart in that business.

"Two-thirds of our leads come from Google, and more than half come from the search term 'open source'," said Ismael Ghalimi, CEO and founder of Intalio, which develops software for business process applications. Ghalimi spoke here Monday on an entrepreneurs' panel at SDForum's Global Open Source Conference.

Daniel Chalef, CEO of KnowledgeTree, which develops document management software, added that he has an unfair advantage over proprietary software because his company gets linked in many open-source directories. That linking puts KnowledgeTree in the top three or four vendors on Google searches. That drives an enormous amount of traffic.

Read More Article...

No comments: