Agnitas E-Mail Marketing system as Open Source

Surprisingly offline media can still deliver genuine news to me. The recent issue of Internet World Business contained an article that the renowned German E-Mail Marketing specialist Agnitas has releas their email- and dialog-marketing software package as Open Source (see press release) .

Since 1999 Agnitas is among the leading companies worldwide to provide email marketing services and solutions. Agnitas CEO Martin Aschoff is a highly valued expert on all aspects of email marketing. He is panelist on many conferences and gets quite a lot of press coverage. I was able to see the Agnitas software on many shows. In a market which is under massive scrutiny and has a public perception of being slightly “shady”, Agnitas is clearly among the “good guys” of that industry, taking an active part in the legislative process and working with ISP’s and anti-spam activist on whitelisting projects and spam avoidance mechanisms.

Due to the pretty high price ticket on their services I never used them for my company. So I am pretty thrilled that I can now use their system as Open Source. From their point it is clearly a smart move: they probably get quite a lot of marketshare. Competition might very well get drained to a certain extent. And they will most likely have some users of the open source software move to a premium service sooner or later. Of course there is also the danger that they will cannibalize their charged services a bit.

Nevertheless I am looking forward to install the software soon. The product is called OpenEMM (Open E-Mail Marekting Manager), runs on any LAMP-system and can be found at OpenEMM.org.