The interview
Q: What is your name?
Hello, I'm Ludovic Dubost, founder and CEO of XWiki
Q: What is your product?
XWiki is an open source wiki software platform written in Java whose design focuses on extensibility. We offer two software solutions: Cryptpad, a real-time document editing software, based on data security, which is fully encrypted, and XWiki, an open source software editor specialized in collaboration and management.
Q: Is it SaaS? PaaS? IaaS? Other?
XWiki has recently introduced their solutions on SaaS basis answering to the demand of many users to provide a subscription-based offer that guarantees stability and data security by working directly with a solution maintained by the XWiki team.
Q: Are you a market leader? Who do you consider leader in your market? Does GAFAM play any role in your market?
The success of XWIki is based on its reliability and confidentiality on a huge market, which is dominated by Google Docs, Office 365, Atlassian and other MediaWiki applications.
On first sight, the principle and the functionalities are similar across all solutions. However, XWiki's products stand out for their security focus since we are the only provider to offer a real-time document editing solution that is entirely encrypted and whose system administration does not have access to the content of the Cloud server where the data is stored. This is unlike to our non-European rivals, which can lead to security problems.
Lately, many companies have started to migrate from Confluence, a wiki solution developed by Atlassian from Australia, to XWiki, mainly because of the substantial price increase of the Confluence premium offer, which has become unaffordable for many companies. Combined with an end of service announcement for the server offer in favor of a cloud offer four times as expensive, many companies are looking for an alternative that offers the same functionalities but less expensive. XWiki quickly appeared to be the solution most likely to meet customers' expectations. Migration is easy, as Xwiki is not dependent on proprietary licenses for an equivalent to Confluence's previous offer, XWiki offers support, technical support as well as migration assistance.
Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? Is your solution different or better than competing solutions?
XWiki is different from other software solutions based on the "Wiki" principle. We are seeking to find a balance between contribution and diffusion, whereas usual Wikis are more focused on document creation.
XWiki's group approach and its constant and hierarchical use of metadata has allowed to build a solution where searching and cross-referencing of information is optimized; users save time by reusing and updating existing pages instead of creating new ones that are too similar, leading to confusion and "loss" of data due to overabundance.
Q: Can you name users or clients of your solution? Preferrably in the CAC40, DAX30, Fortune500, European governments?
The open source approach, the extensibility and the adaptability of the XWiki solution have convinced customers from all horizons and all sizes to use XWiki products. Among the customers we can mention are Score, Chronopost, Naval Group, Amazon, Cap Gemini, DK Bank, SFR-Altis, Fidelia, but also public services such as the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), the National Center for Territorial Public Service (CNFPT), the French Association for the rules of design, construction and monitoring in operation of electro-nuclear boiler equipment (AFCEN) as well as many German public services. Known Confluence, which have migrated to XWiki include the City of Nürnberg and the Deutsche Bahn.
Q: Tell us about a successful implementation. How did you implement it, why was it a success, where is this implementation today? Plans for the future? How is the relation with the client? Did the client help you get other clients?
Among our many clients, the Swiss government is a good showcase for XWiki.
XWiki is being used for the online historical encyclopedia project under the supervision of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (ASSH/SAGW). Implementation required a total overhaul of existing resources. In addition to the joint edition in the three Swiss national languages (German, French, Italian), the XWiki teams had to develop three operational workflows to create and edit the articles, to revise and translate them, to add references and multimedia elements (links, photographs, videos, etc.) and finally to publish everything within a reasonable time frame and searchable based on different categories such as theme, places, people, dates or lexicon.
This is just one implementation, that proves once again that there are perennial, free and competitive European alternatives offering solutions that can easily match or surpass the big hegemonic groups from outside Europe that try to monopolize Europe.