Open Market

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 number one ecommerce IPOs. The stock more than doubled on its number one 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 corporation its ecommerce software with Future Tense's content supervision system.

Open Market was later acquired by Divine in 2001 for approximately $59 million. Divine later reported 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 companies from the Divine bankruptcy. FatWire has extended the Open Market software as well as currently services Open Market's original content management client base.

FatWire was acquired in 2011 by Oracle, as well as OpenMarket's content Management is now branded as Oracle WebCenter Sites.

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 list of paraphrases have since been developed for many other Web servers.

OpenMarket also owned patents for the shopping cart filed in 1994, session identifiers filed in 1998, and extension card payments over the internet filed in 1998.