If you don’t know what demand generation is, well, you probably should in these days of the importance of the Internet on a company’s sales & marketing effort.
Tom Elrod and Roy Russo, early core developers at JBoss, have recently announced their new venture — Loopfuse. Loopfuse is in the game for creating an open source alternative for demand generation. There are some big names already in the business with Eloqua leading the charge. And Tom and Roy should have some good competitive insight to what works and what doesn’t — JBoss used Eloqua for a majority of their online lead generation capabilities. Roy was in charge of the website in the early days and went on to become the lead developer for the successful JBoss Portal product. I met Tom years and years ago at AJUG and then later Tom worked for me at Vocalocity. At Vocalocity, I created what became JBoss Remoting and worked to integrate it into JBoss and Tom later took over JBoss Remoting and moved to JBoss full-time. Both guys are solid developers.
And, they’re off to a quick start with the first release of Loopfuse OneView.
What’s completely missing from the product is the horrible designs that JBoss often used for their early websites and web products — in this release, the product actually looks professional and doesn’t look like a 5th grader did it for his weekend school project.
Currently, the product plans look to be both a GPL version of LoopFuse for those hacks like myself who want to look under the hoods. Of course, you can also get the Enterprise version for a fee – and most hacks like myself also want to pay someone else to deal with it instead of trying to have yet-another-open-source-thing-I-have-to-deal-with-myself. I’m still waiting for the hosted version of their product to be released – I would imagine thats in the works if not already done.
Best of luck to Tom and Roy! We need more web entrepreneurs willing to take a risk and do something in Atlanta. Hopefully they’ll be as successful as JBoss one day….
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