Equinox Expanding into Support for Koha Open Source ILS

Plan was in the works before PTFS/LibLime deal developed

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 02/12/2010

• Equinox offering two new Koha support packages
• Company taps in-house experts familiar with Koha
• Reaction to Enterprise Koha, and growing interest in Open Source

Yesterday, Equinox Software, which has built its name and business supporting the Evergreen open source integrated library system (ILS) its founders helped develop, announced plans to support Koha, the other major open source ILS.

(The announcement was made about 12 hours prior to another unexpected announcement in the open source ILS market: that the acquisition of the main Koha development and support vendor LibLime by PTFS has been called off. Equinox said its new offering is not directly related to the LibLime/PTFS situation.)

New support packages
The company announced two new support packages:

• Koha on Demand, "aimed at libraries looking for quick provisioning of new Koha databases ... with system administration managed by Equinox," and
• Koha Dedicated Hosting, which "provides a virtual private server (VPS) with Koha installed. This service is geared toward libraries looking to outsource the provisioning, hosting, and basic maintenance of a Koha database while still having direct access to customize and develop their Koha installations as they see fit."

In-house expertise
The company said it is "taking advantage of in-house Koha expertise to be able to diversify our service offerings," according to Galen Charlton, Equinox VP for data services. In fact, Charlton himself is a large component of that in-house Koha expertise, having served until August 2009 as LibLime's VP of research and development. Aside from his duties as Equinox, he is currently the release manager of the upcoming Koha version 3.2 release, and ranks fourth in terms of individual contributions to the Koha codebase.

Charlton added that the company also employs Joe Atzberger, a developer with Koha experience who also worked at LibLime, and that it "will also be working with some partners to help provide specific services as we ramp up internal training and staffing."

Long-term promise
Equinox also took the opportunity to hightlight its Equinox Promise as a response to "debate in the Koha community about certain issues regarding development and community assets."

This is a veiled reference to the reaction generated by LibLime's announcement of its plans to offer Koha Enterprise, a product that gives customers access to premium features before they are offered to the broader Koha community. The Equinox Promise asserts, among other things, that the company believes "in a transparent, open software development process, and we promise to do everything we can to maintain and improve transparency in every part of that process."

Equinox seems to be positioning itself to take advantage of some of the backlash caused by LibLime's announcement of its Enterprise Koha product, as well as growing interest in both open source ILS products.

Charlton told LJ, "Offering support for Koha has been considered by Equinox for a while. While the news concerning other U.S. Koha support vendors did influence our timing, expanding our services to cover more library open source software products is part of a long term strategy to offer more services to more libraries."