SpikeSource announced its expansion into Europe with the unveiling of the first seven local solution providers and strategic partnerships with leading European open source technology providers, including Interactive Ideas and Open-Xchange. The expansion into Europe marks the next stage in SpikeSource's growth, bringing together the global open source community with a network of local European solution providers and ISVs to deliver applications with enterprise-class functionality at a much lower level of complexity and cost.

From the business user perspective, the number of open source options is increasing and many companies are now aware of the advantages that open source applications can offer through lower acquisition costs, vendor independence, and reliability. According to Forrester Research, "72% of European firms claim lower TCO and lower acquisition costs as the key advantages over commercial software." However, while open source alternatives provide new opportunities for SMEs and large enterprises previously unable to implement enterprise applications due to the prohibitive cost of proprietary solutions, many SMEs lack the requisite skills and experience to implement raw open source applications.

To address this and enable the open source application market to follow the same growth trajectory that has been seen in the operating system market, SpikeSource is working with European solution providers to reduce the amount of time and internal resources previously dedicated to installing, configuring and maintaining software solutions based on open source infrastructure and applications. These partnerships, forged at the local level, result in tightly integrated and well-deployed content management, business intelligence, CRM, and email, calendaring and collaboration software specifically relevant to the local market. These applications are pre-configured, integrated, tested and maintained by SpikeSource and its ISV partners, for simplified deployment.

"Western Europe is right at the top of the league of open source contributors, when you compare number of open source mailing list postings from different countries with the Internet penetration of each country," said Kim Polese, CEO, SpikeSource. "The open source market in Europe is not only vibrant from a community perspective, but there is also real demand for business-ready open source solutions that can be delivered to SMEs and large enterprises. We're excited to be launching into Europe, working with both the creators and consumers of open source applications to deliver enterprise-class solutions for businesses of all sizes."

To mark its launch into the European market, SpikeSource has unveiled its first raft of European technology providers, including LinuxIT Europe, CorraTech (France), dri (Portugal), LINAGORA (France), Outdare (Netherlands), Menta AG (Germany) and Xeokydo (Germany). In addition, SpikeSource has reached an agreement with UK distribution company Interactive Ideas to be a master distributor for the region.

"SpikeSource brings an excellent proposition to the open-source channel, allowing our resellers to deliver tested and supported application solution stacks. Many companies are now aware of the benefits that open-source can deliver, but the applications they require to run their business have not been available," added Mike Trup, Interactive Ideas Managing Director.