Hippo consolidates its leadership status in the open-source software community

Hippo, a leading vendor of open source Enterprise Content Management and Portal technology, further demonstrated its leadership in the open source community with the announcement of the joining of the tenth member to its Technology Expertise Team with the prestigious status of ‘committer’ to projects of The Apache Software Foundation.

Out of its team of over 50 employees, nine others have attained this status. Three more have since received recognition for their technical excellence and contribution by achieving 'member' level.

Developers are accepted as committers by the ASF based on the quality and quantity of their contributions to Apache open-source development projects. Led by Hippo’s CTO, Arje Cahn, the Hippo Technology Expertise Team includes ASF members and committers to a broad range of Apache projects including Cocoon, Jetspeed, Portals, Wicket, and Jackrabbit.

The number of Hippo developers accepted as Apache committers is indicative both of the high levels of technical expertise within the company, and of its commitment to contributing to open source development projects and enriching the world’s store of open source software. The ASF process is meritocratic: to attain committer status, developers have to be voted on by other committers. Only several hundred of the thousands of developers working on Apache projects are able to reach committer status while member status is reserved to a select group of technological leaders.

“To have so many members of our team awarded Apache committer status is a testament to the quality and innovative nature of our work as well as to Hippo’ s community spirit,” said Hippo CTO Arje Cahn. “We believe very strongly in the Apache Way, and we try to show our support for the community whenever we can. We look forward to continued collaboration with the Apache community and to making further contributions to Apache projects.”

The ten Hippo Technology Expertise Team members active in the Apache development community include:

• Arje Cahn, ASF member and committer Apache Cocoon
• David Sean Taylor, ASF member and committer Apache Portals
• Ate Douma, ASF member and committer Apache Portals and Apache Wicket
• Woonsan Ko, ASF committer Apache Portals
• Vivek Kumar, ASF committer Apache Portals
• Ard Schrijvers, ASF committer Apache Cocoon and Apache Jackrabbit
• Dennis Dam, ASF committer Apache Portals
• Jeroen Reijn, ASF committer Apache Cocoon
• Jasha Joachimsthal, ASF committer Apache Cocoon
• Randy Watler, ASF committer Apache Jetspeed

The team’s technical expertise and standing in the Apache community are leveraged in Hippo's core products, of which the recently released CMS 7, the company's flagship product, is a prime example. CMS 7 features full JSR 170 compliance based on Apache Lucene and Apache Jackrabbit.

Reflecting the Apache philosophy, the team made CMS 7 a highly extensible, open product. As its key innovative feature, it offers a faceted repository introducing “drop and start” dynamic categorization of content allowing for organizations to significantly speed up implementation and acceptance resulting in a dramatically improved ROI compared to traditional CMS. CMS 7 is a showcase of the effectiveness of Hippo's dedication to innovation, technological leadership and cooperation in the Apache community.

As the main sponsor of the ApacheCon Europe 2009, which is occurring in Amsterdam from March 23-27, 2009, Hippo’s CTO Arje Cahn will be organizing the Apache meetups at ApacheCon Europe 2009. These free sessions will be on March 23rd and 24th, before the event kicks into full swing. The sessions will be evenings of presentations and discussions to bring together users, committers, managers and developers of ASF projects such as Jackrabbit, Portals, Wicket, Lucene and Maven.