OPENAVENUE CLOSES $4.6 MILLION FINANCING
January 20, 2000
Ray Evans
831/440-1725, ext. 47
revans@openave.com
Innovative OpenSource Service Provider (OSP?) Poised to Drive OpenIndustry?
Scotts Valley, CA -- Paul Hessinger, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of OpenAvenue, today announced that the firm has closed a $4.6 million financing. Created in July 1999, OpenAvenue is a privately-held, business-to-business company specializing in Web-based hosting, management, and distribution of worldwide collaborative software development projects. OpenAvenue hosts application development content provided by individual and corporate content owners, and makes it available to a worldwide community of software developers under open source, community-based, and private licensing.
The net proceeds of the financing will be used to aid the company in evolving its proprietary global collaborative infrastructure. In addition, these proceeds will be applied to aggregating a rich core of content, building community, rolling out hosting, lifecycle management and collaboration services, and driving traffic to the OpenAvenue Web site.
"I am extremely gratified by the enormous demand we received from experienced investors from both the technology and financial worlds; this financing closed very quickly and provided the company with the financial resources required for its next significant growth stage," said Andy Brown, president of CounterPoint Capital Management and an OpenAvenue board member. As an OpenAvenue investor, CounterPoint also served as placement agent for the financing.
According to Bloor Research, an industry analyst firm, ("When ASP Meets OpenSource," www.it-director.com, 12/2/99), "...OpenAvenue has brought all the pieces together to provide a hosting environment for collaborative development of open source application components...We agree with OpenAvenue's timing. The industry is now conditioned to accept the ASP hosting model, is ready to trust open source software, and recognises the need to build new applications very rapidly and more cost effectively in order to exploit the Web. By being first to recognise the potential of these factors OpenAvenue gets to be front runner in a one-horse race with a large prize...OpenAvenue has recently announced its top management team and it makes impressive reading with well-known names from consultancy and from vendors of many of the types of infrastructure products that will be needed in this environment."
OpenAvenue and The Next Wave of Open Source Acceptance
According to Adrian Bowles, industry analyst and president of Business Technology Network, "The next challenge for the open source model is to cross the chasm that currently separates community-based development from the larger world of corporate software developers. Opensourcing the development of non-proprietary components to an outside pool of talent makes good business sense if there is an infrastructure in place to mitigate the risk." Bowles concluded, "OpenAvenue?s model is squarely aimed at providing the means to manage these projects in a way that makes them acceptable to the corporate community."
About OpenAvenue
The OpenAvenue portal provides an infrastructure of productivity tools and services around a core of hosted content to facilitate collaborative effort among a worldwide community of developers who come to OpenAvenue for project participation and knowledge sharing. Software content is made available by open source authors, shareware developers, freeware contributors, independent software vendors (ISVs) and IT consulting organizations with applications that can benefit from community participation.
How To Reach OpenAvenue
OpenAvenue?s corporate portal can be found online at openavenue.com.
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