Essentia, a developer of software platforms and solutions for online communities and commerce, today announced the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) has implemented EssentiaESP, the first community-engagement platform designed specifically for commercial open source, to power the Open Solutions Alliance community portal, a federated community of open source business and developer communities (http://www.opensoulutionsalliance.org). Founded in 2007, the OSA is a nonprofit, vendor-neutral consortium dedicated to driving the adoption of comprehensive open business solutions.

The OSA is using EssentiaESP, a 2008 InfoWorld 100 award-winning product, to build and manage the OSA community. The EssentiaESP environment supports multiple project types, as seen on the OSA community portal with core projects that include: the Common Customer View (CCV) project; Interoperability projects between OSA member companies like the Hyperic/Jaspersoft integration; and Member projects for OSA companies including Hyperic, Ingres, Jaspersoft, Openbravo, SpikeSource, and others.

“We selected EssentiaESP to power the Open Solutions Alliance community portal to provide an infrastructure and environment for collaboration across the OSA member companies,” said new OSA president and current vice president and general manager of open source business at Unisys, Anthony Gold.

"Open source communities are evolving and require a collaboration platform partner that can support the overlapping needs of members of multiple communities as represented in the OSA. Essentia delivers a platform that can support the needs of such a meta-community," said Nick Halsey, vice-president of marketing at Jaspersoft. "As a founding member of the OSA, Jaspersoft is pleased to be working with Essentia to help define how the individual member's community sites can be integrated through the OSA, and its new community portal, powered by EssentiaESP."

“OSA’s choice of EssentiaESP reaffirms our leadership in community development, collaboration, commerce, and open source development,” said Gopi Ganapathy, president and CEO of Essentia. “With Essentia, OSA member company interoperability efforts can now be opened to the world-wide community of open source developers,” summarized Ganapathy.

Essentia Ends Banner Year

Being selected as the infrastructure provider for the OSA meta-community marks the end of a tremendous year of success for Essentia that included the launch of a new flagship product, industry recognition, and participation in the prestigious MyGOSSCON open source conference in Kuala Lumpur.

Launched earlier this year at OSCON 2008 in Portland, Oregon, EssentiaESP received immediate critical acclaim and was recently recognized along with Jaspersoft as part of the 2008 InfoWorld 100 in recognition of the initial deployment of EssentiaESP for JasperForge, the 90,000-member Jaspersoft community. "Breathing new life into outdated operations, advancing business goals with inventive use of technology -- this year's winners demonstrate, once again, that innovative, business-minded IT is the lifeblood of successful organizations," said Jason Snyder, Senior Editor for InfoWorld.

Recently, Essentia founder, Gopi Ganapathy, was invited to address the second annual Malaysian Government Open Source Software Conference (MyGOSSCON) in Kula Lumpur, Malaysia. MyGOSSCON is a conference designed to support the “Accelerated Adoption” (Phase II) of the Malaysian Public Sector OSS Master Plan Program. Ganapathy addressed the conference on the topic of Building Vibrant Open Source Communities drawing on his experience from the OpenOffice.org, java.net, NetBeans, and JasperForge.org communities.

About Essentia

Essentia, the leading provider of solutions for commercial open source software communities, was founded in 2006 by experts in open source and collaborative software development who have delivered, deployed, and managed many of the most significant first-generation communities like OpenOffice.org, java.net, and Subversion. Essentia is a global company based in San Francisco, California and Chennai, India with offices in Austin and Houston, Texas; New Jersey; London; and Singapore. Essentia customers include Fortune 500 and emerging companies. More information at (800) 573-9137, sales@essentia-corp.com, or www.essentia-corp.com.