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I met the Managing Partner of Zeropoint.it - Jelle Mattelaer - at SI3 in LMKR - and two things stood out right off the bat.
The first is their business niche. Although what they’re doing still falls under custom software development or customization, but they have atleast one slightly distinguishing aspect. They specialize in customizing and enhancing open-source systems - e.g. a client might be trying to implement, say, a CRM system wanting a special feature. But this open-source focus also extends to open-source companies who want a dedicated team to build out some key features on their own products.
Lets say I have a product X that I’m building using an open-source process, and making money off of using premium support and services. Since I have a business and clientele I would still be responsible for delivering features against a specific roadmap. Some community owners are really good are rallying together support for a set feature roadmap (e.g. the firefox community) but other communities often tend to work more or less on their own schedule and terms. If thats the case and you have pressing demands for features against a schedule, hiring a dedicated team to work on your open-source product may not be a bad idea.
The second thing that really stood out from that meeting was just how Green their management seems to be - despite having Belgian origins, their firm seem to be rather ununsually pro-pakistan. Their blog highlights some interesting pro-green facts, and even in our meeting Jelle had mentioned the advantages they’ve seen from being here.
The third interesting thing that I saw researching this story is this PingMyCompany thread about them, which seems to suggest an interesting completely open working model. Jelle, would you like to share some details of it?
| Written by Osama A. on 06/27/08 in HR & Mgmt, Software & I.T. |
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June 27th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
@Sunshine,
The person obviously really doesnt know us - we just moved into a bigger (more expensive?) office and are expanding very quickly.
We also tell our employees to clearly call us if there’re any issues, and they have internal blogs to rant or ask to be spoilt.
P.S. we’re too fast to have politics, let alone layers of management - everyone can challenge anything in terms of our strategies, code, design what have you. Our people tend to point out grammatical mistakes I make.
So really… dont believe everything you read in anonymous comments.
We dont at GnW either - as a responsibility, we delete baseless anonymouse comments about companies (unless there’s a specific experience backing it).
Lets try to make the world a better place eh?
August 22nd, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Hi!
My name is Bart, and I’m Jelle’s partner in the Zeropoint.IT venture. First of all, thanks a lot for your great article. We felt it in our website visit statistics.
In your last sentence, you’re asking for some more information. What exactly would you like to hear form us?