There are several reasons why Likewise Open dominates our category (and for the record, with something like 60 times the adoption of our nearest competitor).  Two primary reasons have been the technical strength of the product and its availability under a free open source license.  Years after we released Likewise Open, an astounding 50,000 organizations are using it and Likewise Enterprise to authenticate, secure, and manage Linux, Unix, and Mac – providing a single identity store with single sign-on across multiple platforms and leveraging organizations’ existing infrastructure and investment in Active Directory (and share files across those systems).

Open source isn’t just about free software. When done correctly it’s about building a company with a very different model–a model that allows us to invest more heavily in software engineers than our competitors.  For our premium product, we can charge less for a better product because of our development model.  While we’ve been driving continued year-over-year revenue growth, our computers have had the wobbles.  We’ve seen the following from our competitors:

  • Repeated and ongoing layoffs of developers and sales personnel
  • Investment then pullback from overseas markets
  • Off-shoring of core development to China.
  • Using marketing bluster to distract from technical shortcomings

We’ve continued to grow our primary US-based development team as well as our European development team.

Likewise Open is more than just free; it has an active community helping us build, test and improve the project — not just making it a great platform, but significantly reducing the costs of development, accelerating our time to market, while providing a quality product.  Companies like VMWare, Citrix, EMC, Novell, Canonical–not to mention hundreds of integrators that are part of the Likewise Open community.

Likewise Open has also proven to be an incredible on-ramp for those wanting to move to Likewise Enterprise.  And that doesn’t even take into account what we are doing with Likewise-CIFS – which enables file sharing across those networks.

More to come on Likewise Open.