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After 25 years in the enterprise software world, including co-founding two startups and working at six more, Managing Partner and CEO Anthony Palizzi wanted to create a way to bring open source developers together and provide work for them to do. “We wanted to provide a way for them to connect, communicate, and do what they do best – solve problems.”
eIntero does just that by providing an online marketplace for software developers and those who have a product to develop to find one another.
The company’s site was built on Joomla, and Palizzi notes that it provides “a good way to access the global open source community.” The result is a place where anyone with a product they’d like built can put in on the site and receive competitive bids from virtual teams that might include developers, scrum masters, or other specialists. “It provides a mechanism and practice of development that is accountable, transparent, and high quality.”
The product owner accepts a delivery schedule, and funds are released to the development team. eIntero takes a pre-set portion of the project cost, and also provides, for a fee, on-demand access to tools for project management, continuous integration, and more. “We provide channel for developers to team up, evaluate a project, propose a solution, and do good work together. It is a different way of doing it, but once they experience it, they see the benefits of this approach.”
Palizzi stresses that his model provides a teaming component that other sites don’t have. With software development growing 16 to 25 percent annually worldwide, there is demand and opportunity to facilitate access to customers and developers. Since the site went live in September of last year, developers, project owners and service providers registering have gone from a few a week to approximately 200 a week. Project listings have gone from a few a month to a half dozen a month.
Rates paid to developers are largely comparable to typical rates found in the U.S., but Palizzi notes that “The marketplace is solution oriented, not people or price oriented. Price tends to be at the bottom of the priorities list, with the focus being on the problem. Compared to other approaches, the overall cost is less, the overall time to market is shorter, and the resulting quality is higher.”
