Hippo takes over all activities of American open source company BlueSunrise

13 March, 2008

Hippo, Dutch supplier of open source enterprise content management and portal-software has taken over all activities of the San Francisco based portal-specialist BlueSunrise.

The deal adds the technical expertise of the BlueSunrise team to the successful open source business model of Hippo. BlueSunrise is particularly strong in portal technology, whereas Hippo is known for its content management software. With a presence in both Europe and the US, Hippo is rapidly becoming one of the world’s most important open source companies in the field of portals and content management.

Flying start

All the employees of BlueSunrise and the current management will join Hippo. Jeroen Verberg, financial director and co-founder of Hippo, "We have been looking at entering the US market for long time and with this deal we will hit the ground running. Beside the technical expertise of the team there, we will also have a number of interesting US customers."

David S. Taylor, director of BlueSunrise, "the deal with Hippo allows us to grow more rapidly and the Hippo CMS is a very welcome supplement in our product portfolio."

Integration

“It is nice that the technical integration is relatively simple, since the underlying technology of the portal software is the same. Some of our employees have been cooperating already for a few years within the Apache software foundation” said Verberg.

Dutch open source success

The deal follows a constant growth and success in the Netherlands over a number of years. Last year Hippo was the first and only open source company in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50, a list of the fifty fastest growing technology companies of the Netherlands. Hippo also placed 300th on the Deloitte European Fast 500, with a turnover increase of 517 percent over five years (2002-2006). Moreover, Hippo got a spot in the Emerce top 100 internet companies with the best reputation.