Why DotNetNuke Corp getting funding is good for you!

All of this information is simply my opinion, value it, or devalue it as you may ;)

So in case you live under a rock, DotNetNuke Corporation announced that they’ve raised Series A Capital through a couple of venture firms this week. This was actually announced this morning, so you wouldn’t have to be under a rock to miss it just yet ;)

As a DotNetNuke Core Team member, and owner of a business that lives primarily in the DotNetNuke Ecosystem, I think this is a great thing. Two years ago the DotNetNuke Corporation formed with the focus of continuing to drive the DNN open source project further into the future, making it strong and better for all users of the platform.

One of the things they quickly realized was they needed to build a sustainable business in order to be able to focus on that continued growth of DNN. I believe this round of funding will allow them to continue to do just that.

So here’s a list of why I think the DNN Corp getting funding will make DotNetNuke, and thus all businesses around or utilizing DNN better.

10. This new funding will provide DNN with the resources to provide better marketing and branding, this will go along way to help business sell and utilize DNN.

9. Better acceptance in the open source world, now that the Corp has funding perhaps some of the mainstream press who ignore open source projects on the Microsoft platform will take notice.

8. DNN Corp can hire more people, this will help offload some of the tasks that people normally doing development have been trying to handle such as conference organization and marketing.

7. More resources will allow for more growth of the framework

6. New features in the framework coming in the future will include multilingual module support and workflow/publishing capabilities

5. More books! The bigger DNN gets, the more books and better documentation that will come (I might be biased here as I am writing a DotNetNuke book now) There are quite a few books in the pipeline at Wrox currently!

4. Support! People are always wondering how to get DotNetNuke support, you can get it from the Corp, with the funding it will be easier and better supported!

3. With the newly announced Professional Edition of DNN there will be a DNN reseller program!

2. DotNetNuke is still free! Along with the professional edition there will be a community edition, with the same features, just without the support and services that the Professional Edition provides. You won’t have to buy the professional version, you can easily continue to use the free version as we all have been doing for many years. And best of all, it still open source!

1. Now Shaun Walker can finally afford to get a new headshot taken!

7 Comments

  • Why do you have a clean copy of Shaun Walker's head shot... :)

  • That's not my url! Brinkman tweet'd it earlier today

  • I believe you. Really I do :)

  • Interesting blog post - DNN getting VC funding is sure making open source on .NET look more mature which is good for all of us in the OSS .NET community.

    In regards to this post, I'm missing the points that makes those ten attractive to the VCs funding DNN. If VC money was a pot of gold by the end of the rainbow with no obligations, I'm sure that we (umbraco.org) would have considered VC money as well. But we couldn't really find a model that made our great community equal winners in the long run and I'm sort of missing more open perspective on this massive challenge from the official resources.

  • This post had nothing to do with why DNN was attractive to the VCs, I was simply coming up with a list of reasons why this was a good thing for the community and businesses who revolve around DNN.

    Perhaps that is a big difference between the two applications, DNN vs Umbraco: DNN's ecosystem supports businesses that provide products and services.

  • Luckily umbraco *is* becoming more and more attractive to businesses, but my main point was that the VC funding is only attractive to the community and businesses if it's sustainable in the long run and this means that the VCs should get a return on their investment.

    I'm sure it'll give a great boost in the beginning, but an important complementing question is what do the VCs expect to get out of this deal. Last time I checked neither Sierra nor August (the VCs) have a track record of being philanthropists.

  • I am sure the VCs expect to see a return on their investment, as we know they wouldn't have invested if they didn't see the opportunity.

    There are plenty of areas in which that money can be returned by the corporation and the project, all while making the project and community as a whole better and stronger.

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