Q&A: The New OX Family

May 28, 2015

It has now been two months since we merged with Dovecot and PowerDNS to provide our customers with a completely open-source communications portfolio. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure to see all three teams working together to provide a more comprehensive and secure software offering. We want to show our customers and partners what they can expect from our new OX family, the kind of open-source eco-system we want to foster and just how well positioned we are to achieve our goals:

What advantages will the newly formed merged company be to customers?

Both Dovecot and PowerDNS bring with them huge amount of expertise gained over decades of work in the IMAP and DNS industries, OX brings in the Web Application space. As a result of the mergers we will now able to offer our customers a complete solution, covering the whole portfolio of communications, email and office functionality, from front-end to back. A complete  solution stack such as this allows our customers to get a “single throat to choke”, further facilitates up-selling and cross-selling opportunities and makes for a more compelling and integrated product for the end user.

Also, we can innovate at a much more rapid pace. The Internet is broken, it needs a fix to truly scale to the size it is now, without foregoing users’ privacy and security. Both email and cloud collaboration need attention. Among us we now have the tools to fix this: Dovecot is in 57% of all IMAP servers, PowerDNS in 90% of all DNSSEC, and OX is available to 130m users from 100 of our Service Provider partners plus the many Open Source users – all together this makes for a pretty good start to change things.

What responsibility do you see that being the continent’s largest OS company brings?

We all feel a responsibility to show leadership and strength in protecting the flourishing open-source ecosystem and its goals. The idea of open-source software is one based on creating open eco-systems that everyone can participate in. The Internet is a pretty good example of what such open innovation can do, and there are many more. Open source is about sharing your innovation and your ideas, rather than protecting your intellectual property and thereby impeding further development. By making everything we work on freely available we encourage everyone to take the next step, apply it to their needs, deploy it in their environment, make it work for them, in short: innovate.

What threat do you pose in disrupting the traditional proprietary market?

Marc Andreessen recently said “Software is eating the world” – but really, “Open Source is eating the Software world“. So not a small threat!

Open Source is creating ecosystems that everybody can participate in, closed systems create silos, no matter how successful they are, how well done, they are still ‘Hotel California’s. This becomes especially important when it comes to Cloud Services, proprietary here means not only the software that implements the service, but also the data and the terms of service around such data. No surprise many of them use thousands and thousands of words to “explain” to their users that they waive all rights to them. But hey, nobody reads them anyway – as a recent study conducted by OX shows.

Open Source and its service implementations are the opposite of the proprietary services. They not only create open, competitive eco-systems, but they also are inherently more hospitable to the users’ privacy, data protection and ownership rights. While some may say Open Source runs contrary to the idea of intellectual property, it is really the only system that takes care of people’s rights regarding their data. This is why Open Source will prevail in the Internet Services age that we are entering. Just think of what lies ahead of us in the Internet of Things…

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