Company Size (Based On Employees)

Overview The vast majority of open source companies are privately held and don't disclose financial results. As a result, it's difficult to measure company size and potential impact in the IT channel. However, examining a company's staff size can provide some important clues in terms of year-over-year growth and potential reach within the channel.

Joe Panettieri, Former Editorial Director

January 12, 2009

2 Min Read
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Overview

The vast majority of open source companies are privately held and don’t disclose financial results. As a result, it’s difficult to measure company size and potential impact in the IT channel.

However, examining a company’s staff size can provide some important clues in terms of year-over-year growth and potential reach within the channel.

Of course, having “the most” employees doesn’t guarantee success. But the figures below give you a feel for each company’s relative size and their potential channel impact. Figures are end-of-2008 estimates based on vendor data and/or The VAR Guy’s own market research.

[table]
Rank Company Web 2008 2007 Employees Added Percentage Growth
1 Sun Microsystems Inc. NA 33,350 NA NA
2 Novell Inc. 4100 4400 -300 -7%
3 Red Hat Inc. 2635 NA NA NA
4 Ingres Corp. 350 300 50 17%
5 Digium Inc. 160 128 32 25%
7 Fonality 125 50 75 150%
7 GroundWork Open Source 125 95 30 32%
9 Zimbra, a Yahoo! Company 120 100 20 20%
10 Alfresco Software Inc. 110 60 50 83%
11 EnterpriseDB Corp. 100 160 -60 -38%
12 Openbravo S.L. 95 55 40 73%
13 Jaspersoft Corp. 75 60 15 25%
14 Pentaho Inc. 70 50 20 40%
15 Openmoko, Inc. 61 59 2 3%
16 MuleSource Inc. 60 40 20 50%
17 Hyperic 52 35 17 49%
18 Cleversafe Inc. 42 35 7 20%
19 IPBrick International 40 30 10 33%
19 Untangle Inc. 40 28 12 43%
21 Vyatta Inc. 35 35 0 0%
22 Continuent Inc. 30 20 10 50%
23 xTuple Inc. 20 7 13 186%
24 Opengear 12 9 3 33%
[/table]

Also of Note

  • Compiere, ranked No. 14 overall in our research, is not listed above. The company did not disclose employee data but The VAR Guy leveraged some confidential Compiere market data for his research.

  • The VAR Guy is double-checking Sun Microsystems’ employment figures for close of calendar 2008. Despite layoffs at the company, Sun still easily ranks as the top employer on this list.

  • Red Hat did not provider data for close of calendar 2007.

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About the Author

Joe Panettieri

Former Editorial Director, Nine Lives Media, a division of Penton Media

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