【开源访谈】Countly 联合创始人&CEO Onur Alp Soner 访谈

1. 您能否简单介绍一下自己和 Countly ？

创办Countly之前，我在华为有大约4年的工作经验。我是华为（土耳其）首批员工之一，参与建立华为NGIN (Next Generation Intelligent Networks) 未来智能网络平台的工作。此外，我曾在华为的深圳总部工作过六个月。在这半年里，我与产品的核心团队一起肩并肩工作，华为同事们的专业知识水平让我十分佩 服。

在Countly， 我们为移动应用提供先进的数据分析和营销解决方案。

I've worked for Huawei for almost four years before founding Countly. I was one of the first employees of Huawei Turkey (now 500+) and I was part of the team who created value added software services for the NGIN (Next Generation Intelligent Networks). I've had the unique chance to be in Huawei HQ in Shenzhen for almost six months and had the pleasure to experience the working culture in one of the biggest companies in China and the world. During my stay in Shenzhen I've worked with the core team of our product and not a day passed by where I wasn't amazed by the level of know-how and expertise of my Chinese colleagues.

At Countly we are doing advanced analytics and marketing for mobile applications.

2. 当初是因为什么开发 Countly？

我 们的创业团队在移动行业有深厚的工作经验。我们了解市场现有的移动分析解决方案和企业需求。由于当时的市场缺乏安全性强和灵活性的产品，我们研发创立了 Countly。为了针对市场需求，Countly建立了开源化的产品项目，并在它之上建立了功能更丰富的Countly Enterprise 企业版本产品，现已获得初期商业成功。 Countly能提高安全性因为开源核心允许在私有云和自部署使用。Countly能提高灵活性因为插件架构允许客户扩展和定制数据的使用。

My co-founder and myself have been in the mobile business for a long time. We knew the existing mobile analytics solutions in the market and from experience we also knew what enterprises wanted. Security and flexibility were the shortcomings in the offerings back then and that’s why we started Countly. In order to target these two items we started Countly as an open source initiative and built a business on top of it via a more feature rich product offering called Countly Enterprise Edition. Countly is secure because its open source core makes private cloud and on-premise deployments possible. Countly is flexible because it is open source and plugin architecture allows our users and customers to extend and play with Countly data in any way they like. 

3. 与其他同类型产品相比，Countly 有哪些优势和特点？

Countly 的 主要优势和特点 包括：

安全及私有 Secure & private ：

        客户可以选择自布置，把数据储存在自己防火墙后的服务器或自定的云服务提供商   

        Behind customer firewall through self-hosting on own servers or cloud provider of choice

        原始数据始终属于客户       

        Raw data belongs to the customer.

更丰富功能集合 Richest feature set：

        一站式的移动数据分析、用户分析、崩溃报告和来源分析

        Mobile analytics, people analytics, crash reporting, referral analytics in one package

        唯一能提供实际端至端用户路径数据的解决方案

        Only solution to provide a real end-to-end mobile customer path
 
更强大的可扩展性 Greatest scalability ：

        测试用户已达数百万

        Battle tested with millions of users 

        有些Countly客户收集的数据比SaaS分析公司总量还多

        Some customers collect more data than SaaS analytics companies combined

        每月处理500亿的API要求

        Collecting 50 billion API requests per month  

更灵活性 Most flexible 

        开源架构

        Open source architecture

        使用插件架构开发自己的报告

        Plugin architecture to develop your own reporting

        可获取原始数据以实现快速集成现有的商业智能解决方案    

        Raw data access enables fast integration with existing business intelligence solutions

4. 未来 Countly 的发展方向是怎样的？它会带来哪些惊喜？

我们的团队正在发挥移动数据分析的专长，计划在2015年底推出IoT物联网分析平台。

Countly目前提供推介、应用使用情况、崩溃 分析和用户配置。我们的公司目标是提供全面工具以覆盖移动应用的生命周期。Countly团队也正更近一步实现全面工具的目标，即将推出的 Application Performance Management（APM应用性能管理）平台可以显示网络性能相关的指标，例如：代码级的诊断和跟据设备及电信公司段事故数字统计.

Our team is also looking to leverage on our experience with mobile analytics to launch a IoT analytics platform by the end of 2015.

Countly currently offers referral, in app usage, crash analytics and user profiles. Our aim as a company is to provide tools to cover every stage of mobile app lifecycle and with our upcoming APM (Application Performance Management) platform where we’ll be able to show network performance related metrics, e.g. code-level diagnostics & segment incident counts based on devices and carriers, we are one step closer to achieving that.

5.  Countly针对中国市场做了哪些改变或者优化呢？

我们最大的客户来自亚太国家 。其中，Countly的30%流量来自中国用户。

由于中国的移动应用使用率还在不断成长，Countly决定提供更完善的中文支持。因此，Countly的网页、所有的用户文档和仪表盘已有中文版本。

中国的几百台服务器已使用开源版本（Community Edition）。我们的团队期待与贡献Countly开源代码的中国开发者互相学习。

China traffic constitutes 30% of all traffic coming to Countly servers. Our biggest customers are from Asia-Pacific countries.

Given China's growth in mobile application usage, Countly aims to provide full Chinese language support to Countly. As such, our web page, all of our documentation and Countly server are in Chinese.

Our open source version (Community Edition) is being used in hundreds of servers throughout China and our team looks forward to learning from Chinese developers contributing to Countly's open source code.

6.  您能否介绍一下 Countly 在中国的发展计划？

Countly团队非常有诚意发展中国市场，并有意寻找有互补性产品的中国合作伙伴共同在华发展应用数据分析解决方案业务。

We seek to expand in China and invite interested Chinese distributors with complementary products to partner us to market a secure & flexible analytics solution.

7. 为什么 Countly 会选择开源呢？

有 些公司害怕开放自己的知识产权，但是Countly团队认为开源的方式是在软件工程领域的创新，而使我们不断前进的唯一办法就是分享我们发现。我们大量使 用开源软件，利用50多个开放源码库、SDKs和框架。我们在建立一个生态系统，让每个人都可以从中受益。为此，我们不仅开源我们的SDK、也包括整个后 端、含服务器端组件和仪表板。

Some companies are afraid of opening their intellectual property, however we in Countly believe that open source is the way to innovate in the domain of engineering and the only way to go forward is to share what we find. We heavily use open source software and exploit more than 50 open source libraries, SDKs and frameworks. What we do in turn is to build an ecosystem everybody can benefit from. For this reason we not only open sourced our SDK, but the whole backend, including server side components and dashboard.

8.  你所理解的“开源精神”是怎样的？

开 源是我们公司和产品的核心。我们认为这是一个核心竞争力，而不是用于广告效果。我们热爱我们的开源社区。我们能够跟来自世界各地的开发商合作，是一种精彩 奇妙的经历。通过开源社区的贡献，我们添加了7个SDKs和提供超过20种语言的Countly翻译。另外，我们通过所有的反馈和请求优化了我们的核心产 品！

Open source is at our core both in terms of product and as a company. We see it as a core competency rather than only using it for advertising purposes like most companies do. We love our community and it has been a magical experience for us to be able to work with so many developers from all around the world. Thanks to the community we were able to add 7 more SDKs, translate Countly to more than 20 languages and improved our core product thanks to all the feedback and pull requests!

9.  请聊聊任何你想谈的话题。

虽然我们很努力为移动应用开发者和来自中国的公司服务，我们还有很长的路要走。我们做的第一步就是提供完整的中文版本，让中国用户更方便的使用 Countly！我们现在正在努力寻找中国战略合作伙伴，以进一步扩大Countly的市场范围。这可能包括投资和当地合作商。欢迎通过 hello@count.ly联系我们以了解更多信息。

Although we are working very hard to reach more mobile application developers and companies from China we still have a long way to go. First step was to get every documentation we have translated into Chinese to make it easy to get started using Countly and that’s done! We are now trying to form some strategic partnerships to improve our reach even further and this might include investment and a local presence. Please reach us from hello at count.ly if you are interested to learn more.

- 来自开源中国