CIO: What led you to start Automattic a couple years ago? What's your relationship to the open-source Wordpress blogging software?

Toni Schneider: We started Automattic to form a commercial arm to the WordPress open source project, which has been around about four years. It really started to get traction a couple years ago when it became clear there were a lot of people who wanted to use it more commercially. Rather than just have the downloaded version of WordPress, which is open source, we also wanted to offer a hosted version. To do that, we needed a company. Now we can offer WordPress as a hosted service both for free to consumers and as a paid hosted service to businesses.

CIO: Do you see the potential for blog tools like yours to catch on in the enterprise.

Schneider: Yes, but enterprise adoption has been much slower to take off than consumer blogging. Right now Automattic mostly focuses on the consumer side and media companies for publicly facing blogs. We host blogs for CNN and FoxNews, as an example. However, we do hear that companies desire to have the simplicity of the blogging we see on the consumer side within the enterprise. My guess is people will use blogging more and more for things like project management and as an internal productivity tool.

CIO: So, in other words, it could be a nice alternative to some of those complex enterprise tools that only a couple of people know how to use at each organization?

Schneider: There are lots of great enterprise tools out there, but they're pretty complex and require your employees to learn a lot to use them. In that case, the temptation to fall back on e-mail is pretty great. Since WordPress is open source, there's a rapid pace of ongoing improvements. For example, thousands of themes and plugins have been developed by the open source community that can be used by anyone to add features to WordPress. Let's say you want to allow your employees to use their Blackberrys or iPhones to interact with their blogs—that's already been built as a WordPress plugin." If you had a more monolithic tool that's not as open, you'd probably have to wait for the next software release and then spend a lot of money for that feature.