Silverstripe
A WINNING STRIPE OF SILVER
'From Wellington to the US Presidential campaign is a huge leap to make.
But Wellington-based open source content management system (CMS) developer SilverStripe did just that when their software was used to power the US Democratic National Convention website last year.
Founded in 2000, the Wellington-based company is proud of the fact that, at its peak, its website attracted 2.6 billion hits and handled a traffic load higher than that of online retailer TradeMe.
But winning the contract to provide the website platform for the 2008 Convention isn’t the only accolade the company has added to its groaning mantelpiece.
Earlier this year, SilverStripe was one of only 10 companies worldwide selected by IT giant Microsoft to feature in its suite of free applications for web developers - this despite the software not being written in Microsoft’s programming language. They’ve also taken home the 2008 Most Promising Open Source Content Management System Award and been a finalist in the Wellington Gold Awards.
Add to this revenue growth of 190% over the past 24 months, the fact the company now has more than 30 staff in Wellington, has recently opened a Melbourne office and published two books in English and in German, and it’s easy to see why the Wellington company has been making headlines.
Lee Middleton, Head of Sales and Marketing at SilverStripe, puts their success down to a 2006 decision to move to ‘open source’, or making their webpage-building software available online and free of charge – a potentially huge risk in terms of having their ideas stolen by competitors.
“But this move created so much goodwill in the online community that existing customers stayed, and it allowed awareness of our software and services to grow globally,” says Lee.
“This is how we were contacted to do the Democratic National Convention project.”
SilverStripe makes money by helping customers to build websites and intranets on top of their free platform. With more than 250,000 downloads in under three years, there have been no shortage of sales enquiries despite the global economic recession.
But giving away its software isn’t the only way SilverStripe is unusual: “Our mantra is to ‘be more human’ and that ethic runs through everything we do, from the code we write to the way we run the company. The customers we pick and the work we do for them focuses on making people’s lives more productive and enjoyable”.
SilverStripe was one of Creative HQ’s first residents and graduated in 2006. The company describes Creative HQ as providing a valuable early business mentoring environment that enabled it to move from a startup into a company that could stand proudly on its own two feet.
