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Two former JBoss and Red Hat developers have left the fold to form their own startup focused on demand generation.
Roy Russo and Tom Elrod opened the doors to LoopFuse LLC on April 16. LoopFuse is the enterprise-grade, open-source alternative to demand generation, offering marketing and sales organizations the ability to generate leads from their Web site, lead nurturing capabilities and full CRM integration with most major vendors, said a blurb on the companys Web site.
LoopFuse also offers the capability to measure ROI (return on investment) within marketing and sales department initiatives, the company said.
The former JBossians—Elrod, who leads the LoopFuse software development team, was lead architect for JBoss Remoting; and Russo, co-founder of the JBoss Portal project—have stayed close to JBosss Atlanta base, setting up shop in Peachtree City, Ga.
In a blog post on the day of the LoopFuse launch, Russo said: “After working for years at JBoss and with close to a decade of e-mail marketing experience under our belt, we saw first-hand what demand generation could do when applied to an OSS business. Oddly enough, when we looked across the landscape, all we saw were a handful of proprietary players, that we felt were charging way too much for the value they were providing.”
Moreover, Russo said that applying what he and Elrod had learned over the years “with regards to increasing marketing and sales efficiency, open-source business models and enterprise-class software development, we were certain we could be a disruptive force in this market, innovating faster, providing a complete services offering, and helping expand the market, so the masses could benefit from this critical technology that is increasingly becoming a necessity to those wanting to grow their businesses.”
Russo cited a list of successful companies following open-source business models. Yet, he said, it takes more than just an open-source business model to stay in business. “These companies all needed sales to close deals, and in turn, sales needed marketing to provide qualified leads,” he said.
Indeed, “One thing all of these companies have in common is efficient marketing and sales teams, powered by demand generation technology,” Russo said in his blog. “The use of demand generation allowed these companies to scale quickly by providing increased ROI in marketing and increased efficiency in sales, via automation of the lead qualification and nurturing process.”
LoopFuses demand generation solution, known as One View, is available in two flavors: An open-source, self-install distribution, and an enterprise edition. The open-source edition leverages open source components, standards and community participation for those wishing to have a self-install, demand-generation product that is freely available, the company said. The enterprise edition offers additional enterprise-grade scalability and quality, hosted and support offerings, and additional components not found in the LoopFuse open-source distribution, the company said.
LoopFuse offers support, training and consulting services around its One View solution.
Russo said LoopFuse will release a new version of One View that features more enterprise features on May 22, in time for the Open Source Business Conference that runs May 22-23 in San Francisco.