Victory may 'add to cache'

Wellington open source developer SilverStripe is another Kiwi software firm that may have reason to celebrate Barack Obama's win.

The 22-person firm scored a coup when the Democratic Party selected its content management system to manage the website for its National Convention in August.

Sigurd Magnusson, one of three Wellington College and Scotts College students who founded SilverStripe in 2000, says the win continues to pay dividends for the company and Obama's victory could help add to the cache.

The work for the convention has "simplified" SilverStripe's sales cycle and it may have helped it secure its latest accolade – being named "most promising" product at the open source CMS awards in Britain last month.

"It demonstrated a real-life scenario for the software, rather than the judges needing perhaps to benchmark it."

Speaking from TVNZ's former sales room in Wellington – which has now been subsumed into the web company's swanky offices on Courtenay Place – Mr Magnusson said the next challenge for the firm would be to set up offices or accredit partners to support customers in the US and Europe, whose demands were growing.

SilverStripe's software has been downloaded more than 100,000 times and it has more than 200 paying customers that have spent tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on add-ons and consultancy.

- © Fairfax NZ News