Octazen Solutions is a two employees startup company in Malaysia developing a contact importer software that allow sites like Facebook to grow exponentially in users. A feature like Friend Find where a registered user, by simply entering his email address and password, will be able to send an invite to his entire contact list. No wonder that Facebook has more than 400 million users where 250 million added in the last year alone.
Last week, Facebook acquired Octazen Solutions. This “talent acquisition” as described on GigaOM, means that Octazen engineers are going to shutdown their business operations to join Facebook as it says on the company’s website.

The Octazen team wanted to let you, our valued customers, know that the company recently received an offer to acquire most of the company’s assets and to employ those assets in a different direction. After carefully evaluating this offer, our team believes this is a wonderful opportunity of which we must take advantage.

As a result, effective immediately, Octazen will no longer accept new service contracts or renew existing service contracts, and will enter a transition period to wind down operations. During this transition period, Octazen will continue to honor existing service contracts and will remain your point-of-contact. We wanted to inform you as soon as possible to ensure you have adequate time to select another service provider without disruption to your business. We will do our best to work with you to ensure a smooth transition.

We will share additional details regarding our transition plan as they become available. In the meantime, we want to thank all of you for your business!

Best wishes,

The Octazen team

I have tried Octazen Solutions service in the past, and I can say that their software licenses cost between $39 and $200 per domain server plus a yearly update fee. However, what Octazen is not revealing and GigaOM didn’t mention is that contact importer software exist now in open source at openinviter.com
I made the switch from Octazen to openinviter and saved license costs. The trend of loosing customers to open source is likely to continue which means that selling the business seems to be the best way to go. What does Facebook gain from this acquisition, since they could themselves move to open source software too? Well, this is what spokesperson Larry Yu meant by “talent acquisition” as mentioned earlier.