The vision

The company’s immediate plan is to maximise its market presence in the portals and Big Data solutions business. “We want to continue with our innovation through new solutions built on open source frameworks, including mobile portals built on Liferay, RAPIDO (a content management publishing framework), Open Contract Manager, a mobile media site using Drupal and MongoDB, etc. Our vision is to be amongst the largest open source companies and to become a US$ 100 million company by 2015, with the stated aim to improve enterprise productivity through the adoption of open source solutions,” quips Shariff.

According to Shariff, open source solutions have come of age in the enterprise space and have been experiencing robust growth in the past few years. Gartner predicts that by 2016, almost 99 per cent of the Global 2000 firms will be using some form of open source software.

And what is Shariff’s advice to nascent entrepreneurs who are hesitant to adopt the open source business model? “We advise budding entrepreneurs to believe in the open source movement, as this is the only future worth talking about. CIGNEX Datamatics embodies this hallowed principle not only in our corporate vision, ‘Making Open Source Work’ for enterprises but also, intrinsically, within our own organisation. A lot of our internal applications such as the Intranet, Extranet, document repositories, helpdesk ticketing generation for admin, HR, IT and support teams are based on open source,” says Shariff, as he signs off.

CIGNEX Datamatics intends to stay at the top by widening its customer base and selling more open source solutions. So will other companies follow suit?