Collaboration with our Partners

Collabora Productivity loves to partner with complementary businesses where we can work together to whole-heartedly build and support each other’s success in the marketplace. We want to be well aligned, and approach customers with a focus on our mutual success.

Of course, we work with horizontal competitors in our community – they are able to build their products around our code, which is all is Open Source. Competitors are welcomed as valued members and contributors to our Open Source projects, however horizontal competitors will not want to be our partners, and we have made the decision to invest in, train, promote, and build the businesses of complementary vertical partners around our product. We like to explore this future relationship ahead of time, and ask for an exclusive commitment here.

There are a number of reasons for this. Collabora sells per-user licenses and expects to support your entire user-base. This avoids a misaligned incentive to buy a trivial number of users in order to get access to our high quality support services, product management and roadmap access – while free-riding on our Open Source code to provide the results to a large number of unpaid users. Similarly we provide fixed-cost issue-fix SLA packages based on an average cost to fix a ticket based around a person-week of development. This is a great product for customers to budget against, and gives peace of mind. However partnering with a horizontal competitor who would be free to pre-filter out easy fixes from this stream and/or increase utilization by aggregating multiple customers would make these products unaffordable for us to deliver.

All tickets, average time: 28.25 hours

“Hard” tickets, average time: 59.1 hours

For larger customers we also run pilot programmes where we can invest heavily in up-front work to fit the software to their needs, having a clear commitment to working together builds confidence that this will yield a return.We want to invest in our partners to grow their business, to send them leads and help to create mutual opportunities. We expect them to turn any office productivity related opportunities we pass them into business with us. We are eager to re-invest that business into making ever better Open Source products in a virtuous cycle. Naturally, outside of a customer relationship, we also love to encourage our Partners to invest and encourage them to make their own open-source community contributions.

We believe this approach allows us to nurture successful businesses for both ourselves and our partners, it allows us to ensure that all of our code is Open Source, as well as building clear and mutually beneficial partner relationships.