Open Source Go-To-Market Success: Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung (Part 6)

Sramana: How do you facilitate integrating Liferay with other technologies such as Java application servers? Did you develop adapters?

Bryan Cheung: The nice thing is that because we adhere to open standards, as long as we implement the standard we can achieve integration. There is a content management standard called CMIS which is supported by all major vendors, including Microsoft and Oracle. When CMIS becomes prevalent, we will get compatibility with all of the other vendors by being compatible with CMIS.

Our open source community is another path we take. There are many people out there doing interesting things with Liferay, more so than we could ever do as an organization. Sometimes they build those integrations on their own in their offices. Through the open source community we discover those and make them available to other community members. Because of that, we are developing the Liferay marketplace, which will give those community members a chance to contribute and perhaps monetize their work if they can make their value proposition clear.

Sramana: How did you build this team to support the evolution of the company from its beginnings to where you are today?

Bryan Cheung: We started out with the desire to help nonprofits. A lot of people who work at Liferay have a lot of different ideas as to why they want to be with Liferay. Personally, I recognized that I live in the United States and have access to some of the best education in the world. There are a lot of problems out there than need to be solved, and for a long time I considered going out to developing countries and doing something like the Peace Corps or micro financing.

In late 2003, I decided that business is one of the best ways to make an impact in the world. Africa has illustrated that just giving people money and aid does not always solve problems and can cause corruption. There are various governments there that are corrupt because of all the free money. There is also a problem of ownership.

There is a village in Africa where the women spend mornings and afternoons carrying water from the river, which prevented children from going to school. A group thought it would be a good idea to come in and build a well for the village. It turns out that at some point there was a storm, and the well broke. The villagers reverted to going to the riverbank. When the aid workers came back, they asked the villages why they did not fix the well, and the villagers told them that the well belonged to the aid workers so they needed to fix it.

People need to be involved directly in bettering themselves. If you can build a business and empower people through business, you have a good chance of making a difference. When I joined Liferay in 2004, the goal was to build a company that would make money and give some money away. That evolved into building a company that is on the ground. We can go to developing countries, hire local employees, and make people smarter with technology. Additionally, we can encourage global entrepreneurship because we are open source. We received an e-mail from the owner of a small company in the Philippines who said that thanks to Liferay software he can basically make it the basis of his professional services company. He builds websites and hubs for businesses in his country because the software is free.

The way we grew and the types of people we have are idealistic. We have people who believe in the vision of Liferay; perhaps they are more passionate than I am. We now have the Liferay foundation, which tries to help educate people with technology. We want to develop software that can help nonprofits become more efficient. We are doing more volunteer programs these days as well.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Open Source Go-To-Market Success: Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung
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