Convea groupware adopts open-source paradigm.

Convea UK Ltd has today released its premier web based groupware platform under the open source GPL. In a sector where inferior products sell in the $15k+ range, Convea hopes to significantly raise its profile by offering a free, high value product to both business and personal users.

In a move that will send shockwave's reverberating around the groupware and ASP industry, Convea Ltd announced today that it has moved fully to embrace the open-source business and distribution model. Convea will now provide its class-leading enterprise collaboration suite free of charge, as well as spearheading a raft of impressive additions to the product.

"It was the right thing to do.", said Alan Carter, co-founder and CTO. "We've been fans of open source for a while now, our products are built on top of the fantastic MySQL DBMS, and MySQL have really demonstrated that a viable business model exists on top of open source. By going open source we hope to leverage the talents of developers who want to shape the future of the Convea platform, as well as take the project into several new and exciting directions."

"Convea has always been a difficult concept for us to sell.", admits John Howard, co-founder and Head of R&D, "It's actually an application platform but people have fealt the need to classify it as groupware, or an intranet, when in fact the concept goes a lot a deeper. What we realised is that there is only so far two people can take a project, it's our baby but its time to let it grow and develop on its own. A lot of people have expressed an interested in taking it cross platform, we have the foundations in place to support multiple languages, it's just a question of time."

As part of the open source initiative Convea will begin to roll-out several big-gun applications and that are in development but can now be made public. CRM, Project Management, News Aggregation, Asset Management and an Integrated Database are a few of the applications that will be openly developed. "What we are going to do is deliver the ultimate web based application platform. We will integrate every Convea application in ways that haven't been possible before to provide a product that can scale from a bulletin board to a world class business management tool at the press of a button. And we will do it for free, just like RMS says it should be."

About Convea Ltd.

Founded in 2000, Convea (pronounced Conveyor) allows employees and project teams to rapidly share information, schedules, files and ideas on demand via a simple, common web interface. Convea provides a fully configurable web workspace in which to run Convea applications helping businesses increase productivity and reduce costs. Version 5.1 offers over 19 applications, tools and business utilities including: Email, Group Calendaring, Group Scheduling, Group Discussion, Instant Messaging, Instant Conferencing, Knowledge Management, File Management, and much more. Convea Ltd. is privately held with headquarter offices in London, UK. For further information about Convea Ltd., please visit our web site http://www.convea.com or contact us at:

Convea Ltd
Medius House, LG
2 Sheraton St
London
W1F 8BH
UK: 0870-366-7806
INT: +44 (0)870-366-7806