Dive Brief:
- NGINX Inc., which provides open source high-performance web server and reverse proxy software to many of the top websites in the world, has been working to monetize its product.
- NGINX Inc. wants to become a $1 billion company within the next eight to 10 years, according to Linux.com
- Earlier this week, NGINX released NGINX Plus Release 10, which includes a number of security enhancements and other features.
Dive Insight:
The open source version of NGINX was launched in 2002. NGINX Inc. was formed nine years later to support the open source product. But the company has been challenged to become profitable because many users of the open source version of the product have no need for the commercial product. The company is now looking to expand its user base to include more paying customers and to offer additional value in the commercial product to entice current users to adopt the paid version instead.
“In building a company around an already successful project like NGINX,” said CEO Gus Robertson, “we’ve got to then deliver significant additional value on top of this incredibly great software.”
According a survey by W3Tech, NGINX is used by nearly 36% of the top 1 million websites and almost 53% of the top 10,000 websites.
