agorum Software GmbH - Our Success Story

We are an open source company from Baden-Wuerttemberg in Germany, located near Stuttgart Airport. 

agorum core Software GmbH ((Ltd.) was founded in 1998. The company started out as a provider of an internet trading platform. Hence the name "agorum", a combination of the Greek word agora and the Latin forum, which both mean market place. However, the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000 made us change our direction.

We changed course and developed an information and knowledge management platform which we successfully put to market. This system was still based on the proprietary components of third party vendors. 

Over time and based on experiences made, however, we developed a new system from scratch - using open source components. Like our other platform, this was initially sold as a closed-source system. 

Our real breakthrough, though, came in early 2008 when we decided to open up the source code of the agorum core DMS. Four years previously we had started to discuss the idea, but had not actually taken this step. 

However, as it turned out, this leap of faith was the right decision. Within eighteen months, we had registered more than 10,000 downloads and several thousand actual installations of the software, most of these from German speaking countries. During the same time a community developed around the product. Around 600 forum members (as at January 2010) help us make agorum core even better. 

Open source has opened many doors which would otherwise have remained closed to us. 

Our slogan is "DMS for everyone" and it is our mission to let this vision come true.