Media releases

N.Z. tech business employs new business model to land key U.S. political website.

10 March 2008

A smart product and a progressive business model have secured a New Zealand internet technology company the honor of handling one of the world’s most important political websites, DemConvention.com.

As the choice between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continues, millions of eyes worldwide will turn to the Democratic National Convention this August in Denver. The Convention has traditionally been where the U.S. Democratic Party officially determines their candidate for president, announces policies, and garners support.

While 35,000 people are expected to attend the convention in person, significantly more people already visit their website each day Website visitors are expected to jump to many millions daily during convention week.

Convention organisers have been working with Washington D.C. based website company Dewey Digital to select technology to run their new website. New Zealand company SilverStripe was awarded the job after a global search. Tim Chambers, CEO of Dewey Digital explains:

“We rapidly needed a robust website that quickly and efficiently let us push English and Spanish content to a vibrant-looking website for the millions of people interested in the November 2008 presidential election.

We also needed a platform that could continually evolve to support the latest emerging web technologies. After evaluating the alternatives, the clear choice to us was SilverStripe, especially since we could rely on working with the core developers to ensure success of the website, a critical part of the overall Convention experience.”

With SilverStripe’s technology offering all of the website’s initial needs out of the box, the first phase is already live at DemConvention.com. Work is now underway to add interactive features to support the convention in innovative ways.

The Democratic National Convention is one of many exciting opportunities awarded after a bold strategy was pursued by SilverStripe one year ago. SilverStripe was founded in 2000 aiming to build complex, innovative websites, and has grown to 14 staff at their Wellington office. After building over 200 websites, the team had created a useful in-house technology which let them more rapidly create websites and let clients intuitively update their websites without technical expertise.

In February last year, SilverStripe performed a first within the New Zealand business community by giving the product away freely to create goodwill, improve the tools available to other web developers globally, and purposely heighten awareness of the company's commercial software services.  (A product able to be downloaded and modified freely is known as open source software.)

SilverStripe co-founder Sigurd Magnusson says, “We are extremely happy with the results of the past twelve months. 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. Google has also acknowledged us, last year inviting us into an initiative that paid 10 extra programmers to improve our software’s features.  We’re experiencing month on month growth of businesses around the world coming straight to the source, supplying interesting and profitable commercial work. Instead of costing money, our strategy of giving away our product has worked to make us significantly more sought-after and profitable.”

With 417% revenue growth, SilverStripe ranks 113th in the Asia Pacific region in the Deloitte Technical Fast 500 (December 2007).

For more information:

Sigurd Magnusson
Email: sigurd@silverstripe.com
Phone: +64 978 7332
Mobile: +64 21 421 208

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