Once again we're writing something before it's happened, for publication afterwards. Dig this: where I am, it's still October, the windows are wide open here on the 26th floor above West 56th in Manhattan, and the leaves on the trees in Central Park are just beginning to turn color. Where you are, every one of those leaves is mulch and Open Sales has long since morphed to Zelerate.
Which is what really matters, for this story. The leaves do that thing every year. Open Sales can shed its name but once.
It makes sense, of course. Open Sales was founded by two unrelated guys named Ferber (coincidence? yes). And a quick check of Google (whose collection of umpty thousand Linux machines have intimate knowledge of 1,247,340,000 web pages) discloses some persuasive statistics:
In other words, "Open Sales" was a good example of applied generics. You couldn't ask for better camouflage if your name ended in "Solutions".
So what's with Zelerate?
Paul Carlstrom, the company's Director of Corporate Communications, says this: "Rob and Glenn (Ferber) ... co-founded OpenSales to offer open source e-commerce applications in 1998. A lot has occurred since that time: The GPL'd software has caught the attention of a growing cadre of developers. The product has matured rapidly. The installed base of OpenSales AllCommerce has risen..."
And the company found itself doing "accelerated commerce solutions." And, "because we feel you can't get from 'a' to 'z' without knowing where ''" is located, we've chosen the last letter of the alphabet to start our name."
Carlstrom also wants us to know that open source is what pimarily accounts for develpment speed -- for two reasons.
One is that "we have expanded the open source model to include customer-mandated direction as part of our development process."
The other is that Zelerate isn't a product company. It sells service. With enterprise-class applications, he explains, "e-commerce packages can cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the customer will still end up paying more for services and support than for the original licensing fees." By not making development secretive, Zelerate allows constant customer input to the development process.
There is a common belief that service companies can't grow (or, to use last year's word, <i>scale<i>) as fast -- or as large -- as product companies. This may not be a bad thing in any case, but Zelerate is now named to test the theory.