Traded as NASDAQ: OMKT Fate Bankruptcy Defunct 2003 | Industry Ecommerce Founded 1994 (1994) | |
Founders David B. Gifford and Shikhar Ghosh | ||
Open Market was an ecommerce software startup, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in early 1994. It went public in 1996 on the Nasdaq exchange under the symbol OMKT as one of the first ecommerce IPOs. The stock more than doubled on its first day of trading, ending with a $1.2 billion market capitalization. It relocated to Burlington, Massachusetts in early 1998.
In 1999, Open Market acquired Future Tense, founded in 1995, to combine its ecommerce software with Future Tense's content management system.
Open Market was later acquired by Divine in 2001 for about $59 million. Divine later filed for bankruptcy in early 2003. In the same year, Soverain Software acquired Open Market's ecommerce assets, including the TRANSACT product. FatWire Software acquired Open Market's content management business from the Divine bankruptcy. FatWire has extended the Open Market software and currently services Open Market's original content management customer base.
Products and technology
Open Market developed a number of software products, including:
Open Market also invented FastCGI, a high-performance variant of the CGI interface. FastCGI was first implemented in Open Market's Web server products, but versions have since been developed for many other Web servers.