A New Zealand-based internet technology company has been selected to host the US Democratic Party National Convention website during US election year.
SilverStripe’s website content management system was selected by Dewy Digital in Washington DC to run the new website, which is expected to attract millions of visits during convention week in August 2008.
Last year the Wellington-based company began giving software away for free to increase awareness of the company’s commercial software services and to improve the tools available to other web developers globally.
SilverStripe co-founder Sigurd Magnasson says the company is experiencing month-on-month growth of businesses around the world coming back to them about their software.
“Instead of costing money, our strategy of giving away our product has worked to make us significantly more sought-after and profitable,” he says.
“We’ve had tens of thousands of downloads and formed a worldwide community of website developers who loyally prefer to build websites with our technology.”
The company has also been acknowledged by search-engine giant Google, which invited SilverStripe into an initiative that paid 10 extra programmers to improve software features.
Dewey Digital’s CEO Tim Chambers says his company was looking for a robust solution to let website editors easily publish English and Spanish content to a high traffic site.
“SilverStripe was chosen because project requirements were already existing features and because Dewey could work directly with the core developers.”
In December last year, SilverStripe ranked 113th in the Asia Pacific Region in the Deloitte Technical Fast 500, with a 417 percent revenue growth.
New Zealand Trade and Enterprise ICT business services manager Liz Tennet says SilverStripe is a good example of a small company using NZTE resources to help it grow.
“The company has received a capability building grant and a market development grant from NZTE, as well as receiving ongoing market entry advice.
“It’s good to see their hard work paying off with such rapid growth.”
www.demconvention.com/
www.silverstripe.com