It has been our pleasure to announce that Sencha, a top player in the enterprise apps solutions industry, has been acquired by IDERA, Inc., innovator of B2B software productivity solutions and some of the most critical applications today.
Sencha will become a part of IDERA’s Embarcadero division, which operates the company’s Developer Tools business. This merges Embarcadero’s award-winning RAD Studio portfolio with Sencha’s Ext JS framework, Sencha Test and ExtReact.
The said product portfolio will provide powerful solutions to developers working on enterprise-related applications. It aims to reduce the cost and complexity of developing and delivering applications across multiple device types.
Recent studies showed how customers were 50% more productive upon using Sencha’s full enterprise solutions compared to those utilizing other web application frameworks. Sencha is optimistic that this acquisition will boost its R&D and market reach.
For those unfamiliar with IDERA, the company delivers B2B software productivity tools that enable technical users to do more with less – from database administrators, to database and application developers, to test management teams. IDERA, Inc. brands span three business units, evangelized by millions of community members and more than 50,0000 customers worldwide, including more than 90% of the Fortune 500.
For Sencha’s Community – What’s Next?
The IDERA and Sencha teams have collaborated to ensure a smooth transition. Sencha continues to communicate with its customers and partners in order to conduct business as usual.
Our top priority is you, our customers and partners, and your continued success. That’s why we created a community edition: Sencha Ext JS Community Edition, which provides the most comprehensive modern JS Framework a developer needs to build data-intensive, cross-platform web applications.
To learn more about how Sencha Strengthens our beloved developers, read the press release. If you have questions, please contact us.
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How will this impact Sencha’s GPL releases? IDERA doesn’t appear to have *any* open source presence. Will IDERA continue making open source releases? Increase their frequency? Decrease their frequency?
We have no immediate plans to make changes to product lines or positioning. We are excited to be servicing the JS community and will continue to invest in the portfolio of products. GPL is something that will be evaluated as part as everything else, not differently from Sencha doing it as a stand-alone company.
>>> We have no immediate plans to make changes to product lines or positioning.
I strongly suggest that you immediately remove the requirement to purchase the 5-developer pack which was introduced to boost short term profits. This would be a good start.
As I mentioned in my previous comment, I don’t see too many Ext JS consulting opportunities for contractors in Chicago which is the 3rd largest metropolitan area in the US after New York and Los Angeles. The job market is pretty much dead in this area.
I hope you will recognize that it has become nearly impossible for many Sencha service providers to sell clients on using Sencha in light of open-source competitors that solve less problems but have more robust ecosystems. Sencha needs to embrace open source and engage these competitors head-on, adding value by providing the support enterprise clients require rather than strangling an increasingly small developer community.
Thank you for your feedback. The passion from the Sencha community is apparent, which is very exciting and means there are a lot of opportunities to collaborate on future product direction. We will be conducting customer surveys over the coming months to better understand the needs of our constituents and invest appropriately.
I suggest also talking to the people who aren’t customers anymore. I deployed, maintained, and supported dozens of ExtJS apps to fortune 500s back in the day, and now my own open source projects are the only place I can keep using ExtJS and I don’t even get to use the latest and greatest frameworks. I introduce developers to the framework through that, which the ecosystem desperately needs, and have to explain away why the latest version available to us has known bugs that are fixed already. I fix framework bugs myself and submit countless fixes back to Sencha but don’t get to track their integration via a pull request or use the framework versions that incorporate them in my open source projects.
If Sencha wants to gain customers, Sencha needs to grow its developer base. If Sencha wants to grow its developer base, it needs to properly embrace an open source methodology so developers can feel confident relying on it and stop treating open source as a trial product. Open source projects built on ExtJS can serve as models for the community, and they are not potential commercial customers. I used to purchase commercial licenses for my client work when clients wanted ExtJS, but buying a commercial license for my open source projects isn’t even an option so why artificially limit them to broken code?
This is an opportunity to change your strategy and get back on a course to relevancy, please seize it.
Sell support, sell services, sell enterprise-level tooling like CI, testing, QA, and high-end components. The framework though, the part people are investing their time and code on top of, must be free (as in speech) and open (in spirit and in practice). Selling the framework is only going to last until open source options catch up. They’re getting closer every day and shrinking your market every day
Yep, I agree. Take a look at MS Office UI Fabric components. They are pretty good and they are free.
https://dev.office.com/fabric#/components
It’s not just about giving it away for free. There are several github repositories with extjs overrides for bug fixes. Other improvements are floating around the forums as copy paste scripts like it was in 90s. 1) It looks embarrassing in comparison how all other frameworks can bring fixes and enhancements though dependency manger 2) think how much can community help your developers if you move entire development to open on github. All those fixes you develop and hold on to for years until next release even to payed customers can be merged in from those public pull requests instead. You get advantage of lower development cost by accepting fixes of your bugs from community – fixes that are already there, this is not even hypothetical discussion. We get faster release by being able to pull from dev branch if choose to.
We are so worry about this news, I’ll hope sencha preserve the spirit and philosophy. As a customer that develop software using ExtJS my company is afraid of the plans IDERA have for the framework and the priority the framework have in that plans. We have projects running and it will be a disaster if the framework becomes a second priority
Sencha Ext JS has been the core of our large enterprise applications since the early days of v3. We’ve seen the framework grow into such a robust set of components that it’s difficult to envision how IDERA will continue the life of the product since this framework seems to be off-beat from the other products you provide.
Can you elaborate on the future of the product? Ext JS 7 seemed to be a very promising step forward into the modern webapp world. When is the plan to release that?
It’s early, but it would be reassuring to long-time customers to get to know more about IDERA and their plans for the company. SenchaCon would be the perfect platform to get everyone on board with the company and engineers. Do you have any dates as to when that may be?
Let’s not pretend this acquisition is good news for anyone using Sencha products. IDERA tends to outsource all their development to places like India, and I doubt that will work out well here. Presumably IDERA got Sencha for a fire sale price and now intends to milk the licensing revenues while they last without investing much. At least that how it seems, and I suppose we’ll see how it works out.
I worked with Ext JS for the past 7 years. The product has been steadily improving since the 4.2 release, but there are very few consulting opportunities in the Chicago area where I live.
Hopefully marketing will improve. Also, I don’t understand why Sencha insists on selling the 5-developer license. The product is not that complex that it would require a team of five developers.
We appreciate your comments and will take them into consideration as we develop our plans for the future. We believe that Ext JS is a strong technology and will continue to invest to make it better. We have experience with complex technologies and look forward to applying this experience to Ext JS.
ExtJS was dominating the market in 2008-2011. It has slowly been treading to its demise. However, I still believe it can again become a major player. In my opinion, the MongoDB playbook is what IDERA should follow for ExtJS.
I understand it’s a big sacrifice, but make ExtJS free. The framework / library should be free. IDERA/Sencha should generate revenue on Support. This will promulgate the framework to levels of dominant players. It expands IDERA’s market. This is the MongoDB playbook. They are alive and thriving.
If ExtJS continues the way it has been, I hate to say it, it will eventually be gone with the winds.
Agree, it would make sense for ExtJS to be completely open source (not the fake open source they have now). Most competing frameworks are free with liberal open source licensing.
But alas that is not IDERA’s model. Apparently they have already told the Sencha services guys to look for new jobs. So while it may be a better business model to follow MongoDB’s lead, that doesn’t seem likely.
I highly doubt they’ll make ExtJS free and I agree with them. I don’t like it to be free, is an amazing product and we should pay for it. I’m fine with that. But they should remove the 5 license pack and have the same that they have for ExtReact, that would be awesome! Having an affordable 1 license again that we can buy and more importantly, that our employers agree to pay.
Art Leandro was the crazy one that changed this, and they could not revert that even when they were losing clients, otherwise how would they explain that to the ones that have already paid the expensive price..
But now that the company has changed ownership, this can be justified perfectly and can be the perfect moment for this. And that would mean that ExtJS can be used again by single developers and small companies, and will surely gain the huge community it used to have couple of years ago, before they went crazy.
I really hope this happens soon…
Really unfortunate that GXT was dropped earlier this year (Jan or Feb) when they fired the entire development team. Also looks as though they’re no long in the GWT Steering Committee! And for the fact that GXT isn’t even mentioned in any of the acquisition announcements?! Did Sencha leave all paying customers high and dry? Lots of empty promises over the years and then this! Poor form Sencha!
See-ya Sencha,
A framework built from the ground up by a community that was cut-out, and fed to Boeing and other large customers and every one of the core devs resigned due to bad management and terrible sales decisions. The training and services and support teams are the only thing holding the company together.
The worst mistake was letting Sequoia near it. From that point it was all lies and sticky-tape.
Thank God ExtJS is dead.
The framework is better than every, but no one wants to use it because there’s no ecosystem and experienced developers are harder and harder to find. OPEN UP the ecosystem by actually developing the framework itself in an open-source fashion that developers can count on for their projects. Be useful for developers to use in their personal projects so there are people around that know what they’re doing for enterprises to hire. Enterprises will pay for support and tooling
Don’t get any illusions, they’ve already dismissed all developers and will outsource the development process.
This has already been indirectly confirmed on Twitter and blogs.
Furthermore, Mitchell Simoens was forbidden to say anything about this.
This confirms this all the more.
https://twitter.com/LikelyMitch/status/901055974991114240
https://www.akawebdesign.com/2017/08/29/fond-farewell-sencha/
Please do not put words in my mouth. I was never told by anyone above me that I was forbidden to say anything about this. Sure, there was some confidential information but I never said I was forbidden. Also, I never said why I was shutting it down, people drew a line to the acquisition. I pay for the blog out of my own pocket and therefore if I do not wish to keep paying for it, I can choose to shut down my blog.
>>> I can choose to shut down my blog.
This blog contains a wealth of knowledge from which many developers benefited. Let’s hope you don’t have to shut it down and/or there’s a way to save this blog.
Hello Mitchell Simoens, thanks for the clarification.
Unfortunately, the news from Arthur and your statements that you can’t say anything publicly conveyed a false impression.
Regarding the Bolg, there is certainly someone who will gladly take over the blog and keep it alive.
What do you pay for the blog server?
I have a root server for 46€ hosted by Hetzner.
A simple webspace incl. domain costs only 5€.
Let us know via Twitter if you are looking for someone who wants to continue your blog.
Or can you at least do a DB dump of the blog to Github?
Thanks Art Landro for turning great tools & company into cash machine for Capital Sequoia.
Since your incoming few years ago, you have just slowly destroyed great tools and community to get always more money.
I have been using ExtJS for more than 7 years. Everything was great but after license change now I think is a dead framework. Gartner in 2011 or 12, I guess, they release a RIA framework report and ExtJS was on the top 5 of the list, saying that ExtJS was a dominator in the market. I think Sencha was just a few steps to become so popular that even Microsoft could be interested in acquiring the company. After the “smart” desicion of changing license in order to become more selective and to be part of an exclusive “nich” market In my personal opinion they signed a trip to dead. The only really smart move now is to make the framework accesible to anyone, I doesn’t mean free (open source is always an option) but a price that every young developer that is looking into new tools can go and buy, this is the only way to push new developers and evangelize the community into a framework that Is robust, flexible and powerful that allows you to build the most rich rich UI web applications.
None of the Ext JS competitors that I’m aware of require to purchase a 5-developer pack.
I just checked Webix, Kendo, Highcharts, DHTMLX, and they all offer a single developer license.
https://webix.com/licenses/
http://www.telerik.com/purchase/kendo-ui
https://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts
https://dhtmlx.com/docs/products/licenses.shtml
There are some pretty good competitors that are free as well.
Alejandro , I totally agree with you.
Like .Net framework, extjs framework should accesible to anyone free. while charge on IDE .
I want to see extJS RAD IDE
Yes congrads on putting the screws to the entire development community. Good show!
Let’s see If they propose a single developer license linked with Delphi or RAD Studio in order to use Ext-JS in UniGUI applications. If so, only UniGUI will be the extra cost along with emb tools. If so, it will be nice, otherwise I will dismiss Delphi as web application development tool as I don’t want to pay 5 licenses for ExtJS while I need for only one license.
uniGUI already comes with an OEM license of Ext JS included.
Mr Atanas Popov, we would like to hear why so many core employees were laid off and why do you think this will not impact the services, further development and quality of the product?
Sencha ExtJS is not used to build small projects or promotional apps that are put together in a month or so. We invest years of learning and development in business apps. We need continuity, stability, quality bug free releases, support and pro tools. We want to benefit from you taking care of new standards, browser changes etc.
To stay on board with you, we will need a detailed statement and roadmap for 6.5 and version 7.0, so that we know if its time to look for new framework or not and if it makes ANY sense to keep developing in ExtJS and pay renewal for our maintenance. We wanted to go from Standard to Pro to get access to Themer and consider large investment in Sencha Test – not only in terms of license, but hours, days, weeks… invested in writing the tests. Now I have no trust in continuity, that could mean wasted time, wasted money, wasted project.
If you’re serious about keeping ExtJS alive, consider this – you already have three product tiers – Standard, Pro and Premium. Add free ExtJS Core version with only core framework (only first option “checked”), Leave in only basic components. Think about a bundle with Sencha Test that is essential to any serious dev project. Bring back single dev license, REBUILD THE TRUST AND COMMUNITY. Community that can contribute with bug fixes to the ExtJS Core, with great themes, examples, forums or some interesting components or plugins. Students can build their apps with free version and recommend that to their employers. Employers will be happy to pay for tools, premium components and support, when they can see this is not a full lock in. No one will be able to compete with you. Want an example? We don’t use free Eclipse, but paid IntelliJ because its the best. But we know, that Java code written in this tool is fairly “safe”.
Otherwise I think you only want to keep minimal support, bug fixes and no serious development. In that case you will benefit from support subscriptions until all customers realise it’s a dead end and eventually stop paying and move away…
Respect the customers that trusted Sencha. We’ve been with you guys for many years. It was tough decision to stay on board when 5-dev license came, but we did. This time it’s even harder.
The penultimate paragraph provides an accurate summary of your comment.