On Dec 8, 2007 11:31 PM, Nate Aune <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What would help you to market Plone in Brazil? How can Plone compete > more effectively against those CMSes you mentioned (WebSphere, > SharePoint, Vignete, DotNetNuke)?
The main problem of Plone in the Brazilian marketplace is that it's stuck in the government sector. Outside of the government, the only major Plone case is http://IDGnow.com.br which is very important as the major IT news portal in Brazil. But I am afraid they are not willing to say nice things about Plone because they suffered a lot with performance and stability issues for many months (I have friends in their team who tell me things are running smoothly now). The problem with being identified with the federal government is that a lot of IT decisions are made along partisan lines. The party now in power favors free software, but the after the next elections there is a significant risk of a backlash against free software, specially in high-visibility applications such as the government portals. I believe free software will remain important, but the conditions which allowed Plone to grow in the government may no longer be there after 2008. So it is critical to expand our penetration in the private sector and among NGOs. I would estimate there are a couple hundred active Plone clients outside of the government now, but they are all very small Plone installations, even if sometimes in a large company. And over the years many clients have abandoned Plone/Zope after an initial project because of the difficulty to retain (or adequately train) staff to really take over the maintenance and evolution of the system. I wonder if any of you have seen similar scenarios in other countries. Cheers, Luciano _______________________________________________ Evangelism mailing list Evangelism@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism