[Evangelism] Re: [Board] Re: Welcome to the Plone Foundation!

Luciano Ramalho luciano at ramalho.org
Sun Dec 9 18:23:11 UTC 2007


On Dec 8, 2007 11:31 PM, Nate Aune <natea at jazkarta.com> wrote:
> What would help you to market Plone in Brazil?  How can Plone compete
> more effectively against those CMSes you mentioned (WebSphere,
> SharePoint, Vignete, DotNetNuke)?

The main problem of Plone in the Brazilian marketplace is that it's
stuck in the government sector. Outside of the government, the only
major Plone case is http://IDGnow.com.br which is very important as
the major IT news portal in Brazil. But I am afraid they are not
willing to say nice things about Plone because they suffered a lot
with performance and stability issues for many months (I have friends
in their team who tell me things are running smoothly now).

The problem with being identified with the federal government is that
a lot of IT decisions are made along partisan lines. The party now in
power favors free software, but the after the next elections there is
a significant risk of a backlash against free software, specially in
high-visibility applications such as the government portals. I believe
free software will remain important, but the conditions which allowed
Plone to grow in the government may no longer be there after 2008.

So it is critical to expand our penetration in the private sector and
among NGOs. I would estimate there are a couple hundred active Plone
clients outside of the government now, but they are all very small
Plone installations, even if sometimes in a large company. And over
the years many clients have abandoned Plone/Zope after an initial
project because of the difficulty to retain (or adequately train)
staff to really take over the maintenance and evolution of the system.

I wonder if any of you have seen similar scenarios in other countries.

Cheers,

Luciano




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