PORTLAND, USA: Essentia, a developer of software platforms and solutions for online communities and commerce, has unveiled a new flagship solution, EssentiaESP, the first community-engagement platform designed specifically for commercial open source.EssentiaESP is a modern plug-n-play framework leveraging the latest technologies and social networking practices to offer flexible tools and process along with a rich set of features.

Offering a combination of distinctive capabilities available for the first time to open source communities, EssentiaESP unifies social networking, community management, and commerce with content management, software development and collaboration in a platform that supports multiple CRM integrations with administrator defined code for analytics and tracking. This unique feature set, available only in EssentiaESP, is needed to efficiently build and manage vibrant open source communities.

Currently, the options that are available for open source communities are to either roll their own custom environments using point tools or rely on collaborative software development (CSD) environments that have community and commerce added as an afterthought. Both of these environments fail to meet the requirements of modern commercial open source companies and communities, and actually hamper, rather than encourage, the growth of those communities. EssentiaESP is built from the ground up to facilitate community participation, ease administration and achieve rapid community maturation, driving strong business growth for commercial open source companies.

"The architecture and capabilities of traditional open source community platforms that were originally shaped a decade ago were created without any notion of the eventuality and influence of the Web 2.0 economy," said Gopi Ganapathy, founder, president, and CEO of Essentia. "Essentia addresses this need by delivering a modern platform that is built from the ground up to seamlessly discover, grow, and monetize communities for commercial open source."

EssentiaESP introduces a breakthrough feature called Ecosystem Enablement that allows mixing local and remote environments within the platform while continuing to maintain consistency at the user experience, project workspaces, access and security. This allows open source companies to loosely integrate all community activities, such as discussion forums, wikis etc. related to their projects from within their ESP-based community.

"EssentiaESP facilitates the discovery of community members across the various online tools and web properties they currently use, resulting in a larger community with increased contribution than expected by commercial open source companies, who then have the ability to centrally manage this on an ongoing basis," said Mr. Ganapathy. "Once that community is organized, aligned, and well managed, these communities become a source of significant revenues for their sponsors; thus meeting the ultimate goal of every commercial open source company."

The first production implementation of EssentiaESP will be to power the next generation of JasperForge.org. JasperForge.org presented the perfect use case for EssentiaESP with its large and dynamic community of over 85,000 registered developers, 300+ community-created projects, and extremely high volume of forum activity, sessions and page views.

"With the massive growth of the JasperForge community, we were faced with the dilemma of not only effectively scaling our infrastructure for the long term, but also harnessing the potential of that community in new ways that would benefit everyone involved," said Nick Halsey, vice president of marketing, Jaspersoft. "EssentiaESP brought tremendous experience and resources to the table and provided us with the platform through which we'll deliver next-generation capabilities to the world's largest and most vibrant business intelligence community."