Planet Hippo

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo) — Apache Rave (Incubating) demo: add user and widget

January 23, 2012

Apache Rave (Incubating) is rapidly evolving to a production ready web and social mashup engine. This demo video shows you how a user can sign up, add existing widgets to his pages and add a completely new widget. reCAPTCHA and fetching the widget metadata were added recently.

Tjeerd D. Brenninkmeijer (Hippo) — Looking Back At The 2011 WCMS Race – The Rally Continues

January 05, 2012

Last year I wrote a post as one of our Tales From The Demo Chair Series called “web content management – the most dangerous race in the world”. In doing the research for that post – we found that

Bas van Leeuwen (Hippo) — Time flies when you're having Hippo fun

December 29, 2011

It's amazing to see how much the world shifts every couple of months in the Hippo universe. 2011 was no exception :-)

SCRUM & KANBAN
Even though we only hire the best we have managed to maintain our policy of rapid, but steady growth, this resulted in another 14 hires in 2011. Two Hippos became Apache committers and we found another through our Open Source Recruitment track, bringing the total to eleven! We've introduced Scrum at our implementation teams, enhanced the Scrumishness of our R&D department and introduced Kanban in our support process.

AUTODESK
In the second quarter of this year the value of open source proved itself once again. Out of the blue we got called by Autodesk, telling us (this is slightly paraphrased): "You guys have -like- a really rad CMS, could we please use your kick-ass software?"

Apparently Autocad does not automatically make you an artist :-(
Autodesk did an in-depth, comparative study of Hippo and six other open source products and concluded that Hippo gets "Consistent high marks against all criteria with no major concerns, code looks well architected". Safe to say that this was a major boon to our recently opened Boston office.

BOSTON
At the beginning of this year we opened our office in Boston, to expand on the work already done in San Francisco. We're growing Boston quickly and it is well on its way to become a full blown Hippo office. Within months a Fortune 500 company named [sorry, can't tell] started to become active on our mailinglist. This became a Hippo-wide engagement, where R&D, Infra and Professional Services work jointly to create new product features for our now biggest client.

BIGGER!
Autodesk and [still secret] continue the trend of ever growing clients: to my current knowledge Hippo's "biggest client" has never been "biggest client" for more than two years. In the CMS6 years it was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and/or the dutch AAA. A year later it became the entire Dutch government. The past year we've added the entire national Police, TenneT, the Dutch Railways and many others to our growing client base.

When the weather gets extreme, this site gets more than 1000 visitors per second

PARTNERS
In the Netherlands we've seen a gradual, but radical shift when it comes to partners. Hippo is supporting partners more and more, we are continuously winning deals for and with partners, e.g. University of Amsterdam with Dutchworks and Surfnet with a to-be-determined partner.

I don't know what 2012 will bring us, I do know that Hippo is going to be radically different once more! :-)

Want to be part of the fun? Have a look at our careers page!