Bypassing a number of commercial portal packages, eBay has started using the Joomla open source content management software as a framework to provide its employes with analytic tools, the online auction giant said.
The Joomla Web framework will be used to stage a set of internal analysis tools for the company's 16,400 employees. The company claims that it runs the largest commercial data warehouse in the world, and this software will provide a base for a set of eBay-built extensions to analyze some of this data.
"eBay has always made it a key priority to encourage employees to collaborate and drive business innovation," said Bob Page, eBay analytics platform vice president, in a statement. "We are working with the open source community to elevate insightful ideas and innovations across our company, from our greatest resources, our employees."
Employees will also be able to start discussions and create documents within the analytics tool.
Joomla is an open source portal and content management system, one with ease-of-use features that makes it ideal for smaller organizations with little IT support, said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a not-for-profit organization coordinating Joomla project.
Departments within Citibank, General Electric, Harvard University, the International House of Pancakes, and MTV all use Joomla. Large organizations are increasingly contributing to the project as well, Ozimek said. For instance, Microsoft has contributed code, which is licensed under the GPL, in order to have it work with the company's SQL Server software.
Gartner has estimated that the market for Web content management systems will grow to over US$1 billion business next year.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com
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