Take Genuitec, an ISV that began life as an enterprise services consultancy and now is a thriving testament to the power of Eclipse, the open-source Java development framework that celebrates its fifth anniversary this month.
Based in Flower Mound, Texas, Genuitec first encountered Eclipse while seeking out more affordable software development tools than those offered by commercial vendors. Intrigued by Eclipse, Genuitec adopted the framework and began building components atop it for internal use. Then Eclipse spread like wildfire through the software development industry. Genuitec found itself taking on increasingly more work related to Eclipse development and realized its Eclipse plug-ins were becoming its most valuable asset.
In May 2003, Genuitec took the plunge and transformed itself into an ISV, releasing the first version of its MyEclipse integrated development environment (IDE). With more than 325,000 users now paying for MyEclipse and his company's revenue doubling each year, CEO Maher Masri is thrilled with the decision.
"Our profitability and margin and exposure are higher than they were on the consulting side," Masri said. "From a top-line revenue standpoint, our sales are at least twice what they were at the peak of our consulting business."
Five years. Less than 2,000 days. In that time, Eclipse has evolved from an IBM-controlled experiment to a de facto industry standard for Java development. A recent Evans Data Corp. (EDC) study deemed the Eclipse developer population, estimated at around 2.2 million, to be the industry's second largest, just trailing Microsoft's .Net ecosystem.
"More of a community than a planned and deliberately architected IDE, Eclipse is the juggernaut that is taking the development world by storm," EDC wrote. "Eclipse is the most popular Java IDE right now and is well on its way to becoming one of the most popular IDEs for any language."
The juggernaut had a relatively quiet start. Eight years ago, IBM developers were growing frustrated over the profusion of point tools they needed to cobble together to build their applications. HTML editors, Java IDEs, XML editors, testing toolsall had different interfaces and quirks. Even IBM's tools portfolio included an assortment of heterogeneous point products with little integration.
"The complexity was incredible," recalled Dave Thomson, an IBM engineer who led the initial Eclipse project and now serves as IBM's representative on the Eclipse Foundation board. "We wanted to unite the user-interface paradigms so that once you learned one tool, you could use them all. We realized that in order for our customers to get the most from that functionality, it needed to be an industry effort."
Eclipse's developers began pushing the argument up the IBM management chain that their fledgling platform should be open-sourced. The process took a year for executive deliberations and legal vetting, but in November 2001, IBM set Eclipse free and fired off a press release touting its open-source donation of software, which it valued at $40 million.
NEXT: Closer look at the Eclipse IDE
