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June 26, 2006

Automattic now offers enterprise WordPress support

Marshall Kirkpatrick

17 comments »

How do you make money by giving away free software? Automattic, the company that’s home to several key developers of the free open source blogging software WordPress (used by this blog and many more) has announced today a new service called the Automattic Support Network. It’s intended help large organizations and enterprise users leverage WordPress and the community around it. Automattic already offers hosted WordPress blogs and the great blog comment spam protection service Akismet.

Enterprise customers subscribing to the Automattic Support Network service will gain access to several people behind WordPress’s birth and their assistance in scaling, customization, implementation, performance and more. Team member Toni Schneider points out on his personal blog that WordPress is already used by companies like the New York Times, CNET, and About.com.

One of the best things about WordPress is its community of user developers. The new plugins and services developed by that community make WordPress a richer blogging system than any single company with closed source code could offer. Premium subscribers to the new service will get expert assistance in navigating this landscape of third party developers. I love WordPress and I think this is a solid idea.

The premium service’s price point of $5000 per year per contact person within the contracting company sounds like a good deal, presuming a satisfactory amount of support is provided. In depth customization will be offered at further cost. I’ll be interested to see how well this works for everyone involved. If it works well, it’ll be a great example of what I think is shaping up to be a key Web2.0 paradigm: build your reputation by giving away a high-quality service to consumers, then monetize support for enterprise customers.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, June 26th, 2006 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Melvin Ram

    June 26th, 2006 at 4:41 pm

    As you said, it’ll be interesting to see how well this works for everyone involved.

    It does require the developers have a seperate source of income for a while… I mean, look how long WordPress has been out.

    Also, your real competitive advantage becomes the “we built the damn thing” factor.

    In the long run (few months), others will master your software and offer good enough or better support. One option is to keep certain features for paying customers, as sugarcrm has done… but that isn’t how WordPress is positioned to be right now.

    Let’s see how it plays out.

  2. PJ at Knowing Art

    June 26th, 2006 at 11:31 pm

    Besides the best blog platform, it’s probably the best CMS too, and usually comes pre-installed w/ most Fantastico hosting accounts. WordPress has a great future.

    Are they in Austin, TX? Hire me :)

  3. jean

    June 27th, 2006 at 12:20 am

    I have created my own spam block for my blog, it has to record blocked 4033 spams. Just to point out that I get 200 spams a day. And I coded the blog myself.

    visit my blog at http://www.irin.co.uk

  4. Frank Cefalu

    June 27th, 2006 at 6:40 am

    Wordpress has a good free future. Probably only money itll make is by non profit ventures.

    Offering a web based support service is really plain silly.

    If your a web firm it is natural to offer tech support and maintence at a monthly cost.

    But unless somoene in NY Times knows what type of system their using, and somehow know a little bit about web 2.0, and some of the leaders in it, would they hear or even think of the name Automatic.

    I am sorry Marshall had to disagree with you on that point.

    And the fact this company is making massive amounts of money on the efforts of people like you and me that help develop small parts of wordpress. As well as the rest of the PHP community, is complete blashpemy.

    Not to say Web Programmers should not charge to install Wordpress, configure it and provide training. This is our forte’.

    But to think that the lead developers of Wordpress suddenly found a way to make money off their software is crazy.

    I do agree it may be interesting to have a discussion with the birth founders of Wordpress. But I wouldn’t pay 5,000 per year.

    Try emailing the guys at 2advanced.com , they always respond! Instead of making themselves set apart from the crowd, they should immerse themselves, and want to be sought out. Very much like Mike is doing here with Tech Crunch. He isn’t telling you to pay him to hear his thoughts. Even so, the amount of power in each post you guys make is unmistakable.

    They did do the inital development. Correct.But without immense community support, plugin creation from the community for wordpress, and immense changes for WP 2.0, there will be no wordpress.

    These guys arent gods.

  5. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    June 27th, 2006 at 6:46 am

    Frank, I hear what you’re saying. I do think though that WP-specific support is likely to appeal to enterprise users and getting it from the original horses’ mouths is one way to do it. Three cheers for anyone offering WP support, founding developers included. That’s what I think.

  6. Frank Cefalu

    June 27th, 2006 at 6:58 am

    Haha. There we go Marshall. Lets all charge then its fare eh =).

    Cheers

  7. PJ

    June 28th, 2006 at 3:14 pm

    I’m with Marshall. Not everyone has time to tootle around in the blogosphere.

    If you’re skimpy with custom code something can break, you can get hacked, or things can go to hell. Databases can eat themselves alive. These guys know all the beauty marks, moles and freckles in the code ;)

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