Varien CEO Roy Rubin’s passion for customer service and open-source e-commerce shines in this video, in which he discusses open-source e-commerce and the motivations behind building Magento.

“We’ve been very frustrated with the state of open-source e-commerce -- we knew it could be done better.”

Q: Tell us about Magento. Where do you make your money and who is your typical customer? Can you give any data or statistics on how the company is doing?

Rubin: Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform that provides merchants with a sophisticated software platform to manage their online sales. Magento enables online businesses to develop and rapidly deploy multiple types of e-commerce sites from a single instance of the platform -- globally.

Magento is currently used by tens of thousands of merchants conducting billions of dollars in online transactions. We have reached over 1 million downloads in 2009. In the first eight weeks since launching the Enterprise Edition Subscription, we’ve had over 7,000 merchants get in touch to learn more about our new product. We have closed a double-digit number of deals and now have a strong pipeline of merchants and solution providers that we are talking to.

A typical customer for us is an organization that recognizes the mission-critical nature of an e-commerce platform and expects a strong support/warranty/SLA as well as access to advanced enterprise features. Our customers today include Fortune 500s, midmarket brick and mortar retailers, pure-play Internet focused merchants, and smaller organizations.