BeSafe Technologies Inc.

www.besafe.net is built on several open source software projects. Most of these are packaged and integrated in the Liferay Portal. The Liferay portal provides BeSafe Technologies a solid base on which we are building our online services. We looked at several different options before finally settling on Liferay. At the outset of the project I would not have given a Java application server good odds of getting selected. My past experience with other enterprise J2EE platforms had frankly left me with the opinion that J2EE, while having incredible potential, comes with just too high a price to unlock that potential.

The Liferay Portal changed that by providing; i) a version of the product that does not have a license fee, ii) includes the source, and iii) including several portlets that can be either used out of the box or serve as a base for customization. These features saved us several thousand dollars in software license and development costs. It's important to note that it took the combination of all three to make Liferay a go for us. Free software with no way to update/modify the code is no good. We have made several changes to the Liferay code post launch in late 2008. Having the Liferay source is critical given that we don't have a support contract. It's a bonus that Liferay includes a method of extending/modifying the core functionality.

We are taking advantage of some of the Liferay non-free training classes and plan to have someone at the Liferay East Coast Users Conference this year if workload allows. We are watching the development of the Liferay Enterprise Edition and may (will) move to that version at some point.