JBoss alumni launch open-source start-up

IDG News Service - A start-up founded by former JBoss developers came out of stealth mode this week to announce a new product designed to help businesses zero in on their best sales leads.

The start-up, called LoopFuse LLC, is offering a lead-generation product available as a paid on-demand service or as open-source software that can be downloaded for free and installed on-site.

The Atlanta-based company is entering a growing market where it will compete with several other small providers, along with established players like Eloqua Corp. in Toronto. LoopFuse hopes to distinguish itself with its open-source model, which it said will allow it to price its service lower than rivals' services.

Lead-generation products track the activities of potential customers on a company's Web site and use factors like their job titles and activities on the site to assign "lead scores," which help salespeople target their efforts. The products work with customer relationship management software.

Kim Collins, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said interest in such products is growing in all industries. The challenge for new companies like LoopFuse -- and for customers -- is that many small companies are offering similar products, each with a slightly different twist.

"They each do things a bit differently and utilize different channels for [lead] generation and distribution" -- the Web, direct sales and e-mail among them, Collins said in an e-mail interview. "Some focus more on workflow and process. Others focus more on analytics and scoring. It makes the vendors and their solutions hard to directly compare."

LoopFuse was founded early last year by Tom Elrod and Roy Russo, who each spent three years at JBoss, the Java server vendor acquired by Red Hat Inc. Elrod was lead architect for JBoss Remote and Russo co-founded the JBoss Portal, according to LoopFuse's Web site.

The company has quietly rolled out its product to a handful of customers over the past year.

The product, called LoopFuse OneView, includes tools for e-mail marketing, Web analytics, managing campaigns, and scoring and prioritizing leads, among other things. The new release, Version 3.0, will add lead management and lead nurturing tools, a spokesman said. The software is released under the GNU General Public License.

LoopFuse hopes to shake up the economies of the market. The open-source model can help vendors reduce their costs by drawing on existing software components and contributions from users.

LoopFuse OneView will be priced at $300 per month for an unlimited number of users, although usage will be capped at about 2,500 e-mails and 100,000 page hits, said Matt Asay, an adviser to LoopFuse who is also a vice president at content-management company Alfresco Software Inc. Users will be able to pay more to lift the cap, he said.