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Showcase CollaboraOnline - The open source document editor to integrate anywhere

  • Last Update:2023-01-27
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Collabora Online: the open source document editor to integrate anywhere

Who is...

Michael Meeks

Michael Meeks (photo: nextcloud)

Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora

Company profile

Collabora Online

The interview

Q: What is your name?

Michael Meeks

Q: What is your product?

Collabora Online - a scalable, secure, on-premise document editor that can be delivered to any recent browser: a simple, easy to deploy, collaborative office suite for the free world, based on LibreOffice technology.

Q: Is it SaaS? PaaS? IaaS? Other?

We create cloud software for SaaS vendors, hosters, governments, enterprises, and OEMs hosting their own collaborative document editing. Often that is a significant value-add to existing file-sync-and-share, mail, learning management systems and a whole suite of other products.

Q: Do you provide your technology to cloud operators?

Indeed.

Q: Are you a market leader? Who do you consider the leader in your market? Does GAFAM play any role in your market?

Microsoft is the leader by revenue in the Office space clearly. We invest heavily in working smoothly with their document formats. That makes it simple for people to migrate their huge corpus of existing documents to Collabora and their choice of hybrid cloud. The provision of great functionality in the browser finally stops documents anchoring you to any one OS, device or platform.

Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? Is your solution different or better than competing solutions?

Fundamentally we're an Open Source project which means that - at last - anything is possible in the software. We are a responsive team that can get to work on innovating for specific customers, and build a great product management relationship.

From a cloud perspective we provide only the software, which lets you host your own document-editing 'micro' service how you like: on your own choice of infrastructure, jurisdiction, CPU, Network. We allow our customers to truly comply with the GDPR without sacrificing convenience and collaboration.

Q: Which free and open source software solutions do you use?

Collabora Online is 100% Open Source code, and of course we build on and contribute heavily to the outstanding LibreOffice technology underneath.

Q: What components did you develop yourself?

Collabora Online is substantially developed by Collabora, although we have a community that contributes many good things and a lot of positive energy testing, translating and beautifying things. We also contribute around one third of code commits to LibreOffice.

Q: What are the strong points of your technology?

A few headings: Safe, Powerful & Flexible.

  • Safe -> means peace of mind around keeping your document data under control & compliant
  • Powerful -> we're committed to really powerful full-feture document editing in your browser, while making it really easy to deploy. We also have excellent interoperability with the Microsoft world.
  • Flexible -> we have flexible software that our partners build into their products and re-sell, as well as being deployed by end-customers. We're also a flexible business that can rapidly adapt to meet our partners and customers needs.

In a nutshell we restore our partner and customer's Digital Sovereignty around documents: giving them the freedom and autonomy to make their own choices and set new innovative directions.

Q: Can you name users or clients of your solution? Preferably in the CAC40, DAX30, Fortune500, European governments?

Everything we do is funded by our great customers, and we really strongly prefer to sell through our local partners so that mother-tongue support and servies are available around our products.

We're really pleased to be able to serve a good number of French government agencies - from the Ministère de l’Economie, des Finances et de la Souveraineté industrielle et numérique, which we serve with our partner Arawa (supporting the MIMO LibreOffice deployment across the government), as well as with our partner Jalios supporting Collabora Online usage. We also support the Ministère de la Justice's Collabora Online usage with Arawa. There are a number of great Conseils départementaux we support with Arawa and Jeci - providing beautiful integrations between Nextcloud and Collabora Online as well as Alfresco.

Q: Why did this client choose your solution rather the solution of the market leader or GAFAM?

The common thread here I think is having customers with a clear vision and competence. Often their IT staff are already using and loving community based Open Source solutions. Then, when the business mandates around restoring Digital Sovereignty, security, and privacy with GDPR appear from the top, they are ready to deploy these solutions quickly at scale.

Of course, having Collabora's responsive L3 support with direct contact to expect engineers gives peace of mind. A positive relationship with both a local partner and Collabora working hand in hand can make life easy. We also provide cost benefits with flexible pricing for your needs, and a variety of SLAs to suit you.

Strategically, we see people fleeing desktop lock-in, and seeing the risk of retaining legacy-rich file formats, and software that tie them to either a single vendor's OS, or a single cloud. It is nice to be able to visit your documents on your own or with a choice of terms.

Q: What European policies do you suggest to ensure sustainable development of your technology and its adoption?

There are really several encouraging initiatives here, Germany in particular is investing in building sovereign technology alternatives - that would be a good model to explore.

The ongoing cloud transition provides a great opportunity to stimulate competition and delivery of Open Source solutions directly to users' browsers.

It is essential to avoid wasting this opportunity by migrating all of your complex documents into the same old centralized cloud services. Instead de-risk by hosting a better product under your control, and collaborate by federating these products.

Another thing that would be useful would be to ensure that PC productivity suites are de-bundled, and their procurement tendered, built around open standard file formats. Given the tens of billions spent here annually across the EU it would be nice to see at least some of these acquisitions publicly tendered.

Q: To what extent are the interoperability projects financed by France and Europe likely to guarantee the development of European cloud technologies?

The Next Generation Internet project of the European Commission has sponsored a number of key innovations in 2022 which helped to significantly improve our interoperability, it was great to present these wins in Paris earlier in the year.

This sort of accelerator funding, and the business mentoring that goes alongside it is extremely helpful, but is seed money and needs to be built on. Open Source products often struggle to build anually recurring revenue due to a perception of their software being free-as-in-beer. More should be done to build awareness that purchasing support and services around Open Source funds long term maintenance, and that building a relationship helps to steer the product in a beneficial direction.

Q: Can you give us an idea of sales/staff/clients/end users over the last 3 years?

Sales over the last three years total around Eur 4 million, we are growing strongly, and have around 35 staff focused on Office productivity. We are approaching a million paying users, and around 80 million free docker images downloads of Collabora Online's server software - though it is impossible to count the number of individual users.

Q: Tell us about a successful implementation. How did you implement it, why was it a success, where is this implementation today? Plans for the future? How is the relation with the client? Did the client help you get other clients?

Take note that the large majority of our customers are served by a partner. So, we normally have the relationship with the customer through our official partners. Our partners use Collabora Online and Office as a key enabler for migrating to open source.

Clearly helping our partners to succeed and selling through them creates a virtuous cycle of greater engagement and more joint sales which is something we love to see.

Collabora Online implementations in conjunction with one of our product integrations for example with Nextcloud, ownCloud, Jalios, Moodle, Alfresco, EGroupware, Seafile, Filr, HiDrive (and many more). That integration can be deployed by one of our support partners like Arawa, Jalios, Jeci, Open-DSI in France. Our deployments and integrations are so many and various that there is no single explanation for their success beyond a positive relationship between partner and client, and partner and Collabora.

Its great to work in France with such great software and partners to serve our customers.