Abilian: research focussed collaboration software 

Who is...

Stéfane Fermigier

Stéfane Fermigier

Stéphane is CEO of Abilian, co-president of the French National Council for Free & Open Source Software (CNLL) and chairman of the Association Professionnelle Européenne du Logiciel Libre (APELL)

Company profile

Patrowl

The interview

Q: What is your name?

Stefane Fermigier, founder and CEO of Abilian, an open source software company in the field of collaboration and cloud, active for over 10 years.

Q: What is your product?

We have several products in use or under development, including:

  • Abilian Social Business Engine, an emerging collaboration platform: enterprise social network, directory, collaborative spaces, Wiki, micromessaging, information management, CRM. It is the ideal tool for sharing information, communicating, collaborating and boosting your organisation’s daily activity.
  • Abilian Lab&Co, a research information system (RIS) for research institutions, which makes relations between researchers and the administration more fluid.
  • JNOV by Abilian, which enables the efficient management of calls for proposals, calls for expressions of interest or cascade funding programmes. Our solution manages the end-to-end processes of information, submission, evaluation and monitoring of projects.
  • Nua by Abilian, an open source software platform to streamline the development, selection, installation and resilient operation of web applications in a self-hosted cloud environment. It is mainly aimed at users (SMEs, associations, public services, etc.) who want to benefit from the simplicity of the cloud at the lowest cost without compromising the principles of digital sovereignty.

Q: Is it SaaS? PaaS? IaaS? Other?

All our software can be deployed as SaaS, on various IaaS and PaaS on the market or on bare metal.

We have developed our own technology, Nua, which simplifies the deployment and maintenance of these applications, and which is now an open source project and a product in its own right.

Q: Do you provide your technology to cloud operators?

Not at the moment. We are open to partnerships with cloud vendors and operators.

Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? Is your solution different or better than competing solutions?

Our various solutions are obviously sovereign, and have been co-designed with their users to best meet the needs of their respective markets.

Q: Which free and open source software solutions do you use?

We rely on an entirely open source stack: Linux kernel, Python language, PostgreSQL and Redis databases, etc. We also focus on interoperability with open APIs, and on the use of open source software.

Moreover, several of our products - Abilian SBE, Abilian Lab&Co, Nua by Abilian… - are themselves open source and all our products incorporate hundreds of open source components. For these reasons, we take the issue of securing the software supply chain very seriously.

Q: What components did you develop yourself?

The application code as well as part of the business frameworks of our applications was developed by ourselves. This represents about 20 person-years of R&D.

In addition, we contribute, regularly or occasionally, to numerous open source projects upstream of our products.

Q: What are the strong points of your technology?

Its flexibility and our obsession with the user and developer experience.

Q: What European policies do you suggest to ensure sustainable development of your technology and its adoptions?

In France, we recommend in particular that the 2016 Digital Republic law be applied to the letter, which states that administrations must “encourage” the use of open source solutions. This is even more true in higher education and research, where open source software has been used “as a priority” since the 2013 ESR law.

We also recommend that the proposals of the Latombe report on digital sovereignty be taken into consideration, in particular proposal 52: “Impose within the administration the systematic use of open source software, making the use of proprietary solutions an exception”, proposal 26: “Give priority, in terms of public procurement, to the use of solutions from French or European technology players”, and proposal 30: “Develop the practices and legal framework of public procurement [In particular at the European level with a European Small Business Act]”.

Q: To what extent are the interoperability projects financed by France and Europe likely to guarantee the development of European cloud technologies?

We believe that all the technological building blocks useful for the sustainable development of a successful European software and cloud industry exist in Europe, either because they were invented in Europe or because they are open source projects with sufficient European contributors.

What is missing is both guidelines or incentives to use these technologies as a priority, in the name of strategic autonomy and resilience, but also a better ability for European actors to work with each other and to make their technologies and tools interoperable.

We therefore recommend the implementation of plans to encourage European companies to develop such connections, in parallel with directives requiring the use of demonstrably interoperable technologies and solutions.