Membership Value Explained

Sometimes I wish I would be as clear as Gunthilde Sohn from instinctools GmbH. That's why I want to share her note that she sent to a new member prospect with all of you.

Again, thank you Gunni!

Hello,

you asked Ralph about the ROI of Eclipse Foundation membership and I am glad to provide you with our experience as a solution member:

We joined EF in 2008 after we decided to develop our product DITAworks based on Eclipse/RCP and focus our development services on Eclipse components. Besides using a mature and widely used technology for our products and services we experienced following benefits:

Increase of visibility: having our company and product registered on eclipse.org and marketplace we are not just a local provider anymore but visible to all organizations using Eclipse. This kind of visibility would cost us quite a marketing budget to be achieved through different platforms.

Global reach: we are even visible to worldwide potential customers and were able to generate international leads, new customers and a partner in the USA selling our product on the US market. I am sure without presentation on Eclipse site this would not been possible or take much more time and money.

Increase of customers: we were able to get new customers for our development services - also outside of Germany. These people found us on eclipse.org and invited us to bid for their projects.

Co-branding for our product: Having DITAworks based on Eclipse and also providing an out-of-the-box package for documentation of Eclipse applications provides us a nice co-branding for our product. Customers feel that the product has a profound technology base and can easily be integrated with other Eclipse based products, environments etc.

Cooperation: we experienced a good and cooperative approach of Eclipse members among each other (talking about German companies, I do not know how it is in other countries)

We are participating in Eclipse events in order to meet colleagues and potential customers, learn about the latest developments in Eclipse and present our product and services.

These are the major benefits in short and I can say we a good ROI of being a member so far.

In case of any questions or comments please feel free to contact me any time.

Kind regards,

Gunthilde