Cignex Founds and Funds Initiative to Strengthen Open Source CMS for the Enterprise; Goldegg to Tighten Integration within the Plone Stack; Develop Certification Standards for Applications Built with System.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Cignex, the deployment leader in open source consulting and software services, today announced that it has founded and funded the open-source Goldegg initiative. With more than 26 developers from about 17 companies across 6 countries, and the involvement of critical community leaders, Goldegg brings together one of the largest groups of open source experts and innovators in the content management (CM) industry to make the open source Plone CMS a viable alternative for enterprise CM.

Plone is an application used to build intranets, extranets, portals, and custom applications. Organizations as diverse as Oxfam America, Vote Watch, NASA Jet Propulsion Labs, even eBay's developer information website, choose Plone for being easy to understand and use. In order to be adopted broadly by enterprises however, the Plone application must be more tightly integrated with its underlying stack and supported by a migration path for future upgrades.

"With Goldegg, we hope to encourage a more focused development effort around making Plone a robust system for content management," said Munwar Shariff, vice president of global delivery at Cignex and Plone Foundation board member. "At Cignex, we believe that open source technologies can be made safe for enterprise use, and, through our support of Goldegg and the Plone community, we hope to establish Plone as the de-facto open source solution for enterprise CMS."

Co-funded by a large Cignex customer in the public sector, the Goldegg effort was initiated by Shariff and Paul Everitt of the Zope European

Association (ZEA), and work on each layer of the software stack is being controlled and administered by key developers.

"Plone is a recognized leader in open source content management. With Goldegg, we are bringing the leaders in Plone's stack together to chart a long-term roadmap and strengthen the architecture for business use," said Everitt.

Goldegg finances simultaneous work across all layers of the software stack: Plone, Content Management Framework (CMF) and Zope. Primary Goldegg development on the stack is taking place in three intensive coding sprints, each with a slightly different goal:

--The first sprint was held September 23-25, 2005 in Vienna, Austria, directly following the recent Plone Conference and focused on getting CMF to use Zope3 technology;

--The next sprint will take place October 24 - 28 ,in Fredericksburg, VA and will work on development and release of CMF 2.0 Alpha version;

--The final sprint will take place November 7-11, at Cignex's headquarters in Santa Clara, and will enforce best practices for the creation and packing of add-on products which will help businesses to more easily scale their Plone applications.

Goldegg provides XML integration of data which eases the integration of non-Plone based systems with Plone. The first phase of Goldegg, Goldegg One, will be completed by November 30th, 2005, and will establish a roadmap for Plone that accomplishes two things: encouraging enterprises that have not yet adopted Zope/Plone for CMS to try the technology; and protecting the technology and resource investments made by existing Zope/Plone users.

About Cignex

With more than 50 successful open source deployments, Cignex (www.cignex.com) leads the industry in providing open source consulting services and software solutions for business. Cignex customers include companies in education, healthcare, government and high tech, such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Epson Electronics America, University of North Carolina Healthcare, University of North Carolina School of Medicine and OKI Semiconductor. Cignex is privately held and based in Santa Clara, Calif. The company was founded in 2000 and has been profitable since inception.