Ex-JBoss founder joins startup
639273
JBoss founder Marc Fleury has resurfaced as a paid advisor to Appcelerator, a startup based in Atlanta that makes a toolkit for developing rich Internet applications (RIA).Red Hat bought JBoss, a maker of open source middleware, in 2006 for $350 million. The outspoken Fleury oversaw Red Hat&#39;s JBoss division until quitting early this year, and since then has largely avoided the limelight.He said he hopes to raise Appcelerator&#39;s profile in the increasingly crowded RIA space, which is led by the likes of Adobe&#39;s Flex, among others.&quot;The big dog is clearly Flex,&quot; Fleury said, but &quot;the fact that it is so crowded and there is no clear winner is also an indication there is a market of opportunity.&quot;Fleury described his role with Appcelerator as his &quot;first engagement with the industry&quot; since leaving JBoss. &quot;I liked the product, I liked the tech, and figured I could help.&quot;But Fleury said he essentially remains retired: &quot;My other projects include family.&quot;Fleury is the second former JBoss employee to join Appcelerator, following the company&#39;s hiring of Ben Sabrin as vice president of strategy and business development.The company describes its Appcelerator Platform as ideal for creating what it calls &quot;service-oriented user interfaces.&quot;The platform provides an abstraction layer that allows developers to use AJAX and DHTML without needing to program in JavaScript themselves, and provides a widget library for pulling together common components. The platform is available under a GPLv2 license, and the company has created software development kits for Java, Ruby, PHP, .Net, and Python.&quot;We&#39;re really focusing on RIA-enabling the enterprise,&quot; said CEO Jeff Haynie.
619240
The former head of Microsoft Corp&#39;s Windows business has given his financial backing to SourceLabs Inc, a new open source support and services firm set up by former executives at BEA Systems Inc.
615553
A former Microsoft executive and other tech bigwigs fund SourceLabs, an open-source start-up focused on maintenance and support.
91577
Company founder and former CEO Dave Duffield is now back aboard full time, replacing the ousted former CEO Craig Conway. Solution providers, while shocked at Conway&#39;s unexpected departure, were largely thrilled that Duffield is back full throttle.
246736
Having established itself as the leading enterprise Linux vendor,&#160;Red Hat is in a pivotal phase of reinventing itself as a broader open-source software provider and a long-term technology leader a la Microsoft and Oracle. It&#39;s a tall order, and among other things it will take a business plan that lets the company move smoothly through this make-or-break stage.Coming up with that internal plan lies on the shoulders of 30-year IT veteran Nick Van Wyk. Van Wyk joined Red Hat last year from EMC, taking a newly created role as vice president of operations to optimize Red Hat&#39;s subscription model and create better business processes to support the company&#39;s channel.Two weeks ago, Red Hat also appointed him to a new role as senior director, transformation, in charge of examining the company&#39;s internal processes and operations to &quot;reposition all of our systems to support the next stage of our evolution,&quot; he said.That stage includes capitalizing on its April 2006 purchase of JBoss and the open-source middleware package that comes along with it, as well as growing from a company with annual revenue of about $500 million to a billion-dollar company. Red Hat, whose affections toward other vendors can be fickle, also is challenged to build out a stronger ecosystem of partners to support not only Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS but also JBoss and any new technologies it brings to the table.In the current technology business climate, Red Hat is a bit of an anomaly. The company has managed to exist for nearly 10 years with one core competency: a Linux server distribution it supports and provides maintenance for. The company has branched out into other areas of software, such as desktop Linux and virtualization, but for the most part, the server OS has been its bread and butter.Recognizing it can&#39;t subsist long on this diet in an environment of consolidation and diversification, Red Hat made a calculated risk and purchased JBoss. It&#39;s now trying to position itself to make the most out of that and possible other new product developments or purchases, Van Wyk said.&quot;As we move forward, we will more be described as an open source services and solutions company,&quot; he said. &quot;That&#39;s an enhanced position for Red Hat.&quot;In its present situation, Red Hat has &quot;a base, a critical mass of applications from which to grow,&quot; said George Weiss, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. But investors are more interested in what comes next than in how well Red Hat is currently executing, he said.&quot;It&#39;s not a look at the present basis, it&#39;s what you can do to instill market confidence that you have a sufficiently scalable business model, and the operating system alone is not going to be it,&quot; Weiss said.Van Wyk knows full well the pressure on the company, and said that during Red Hat&#39;s two-to-three-year transformation, the company will be making changes to ensure it can meet both the internal and the external needs of scaling an IT company.The company is currently examining how it handles a host of functions, among them lead management, partner relationship management, subscriptions, financial systems and technical support. The next step in the transition will be to make changes where necessary to ensure the business is operating efficiently and providing the highest levels of customer service, he said.&quot;This whole idea of ease -- the ease of doing business with Red Hat, the ease of support, the automation of those technologies, the time to acquire OS technologies, zero time to subscribe -- those are all built into [our goals],&quot; Van Wyk said. &quot;These are things that have been said to us that customers want to have.&quot;Van Wyk declined to go into detail about exactly how Red Hat will execute on this strategy, saying the company won&#39;t really have a clear idea of the changes it will make until the initial assessment is complete.One thing Red Hat should consider is more acquisitions, said Raven Zachary, open source research director for The 451 Group. But Red Hat should move fast to acquire companies that will help them get into new markets -- such as database and data management -- because larger IT vendors are eyeing similar purchases.&quot;They have companies like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and SAP competing for the same targets,&quot; he said. &quot;Red Hat doesn&#39;t have the capital to compete with those suitors. They need to move very quickly before we get into an era where the largest IT vendors are competing for these targets.&quot;
669834
Former Sun and Marimba executive Kim Polese takes the helm of SpikeSource, a start-up which will offer services around open source software.
337660
The former CEO of NetScreen Technologies has moved on to a new upstart. Can he make the same magic work again?
45575
JBoss Application Server 4.0, middleware recently certified for J2EE, is ready for enterprise production deployment, according to JBoss.
427766
One of the survivors of the early days of Linux has changed its name and folded its software division in favor of doing business entirely on the Web.
459217
DECEMBER 10, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Open-source vendor JBoss Inc. on Monday plans to formally announce a stack of middleware software designed to make it more competitive with the sophisticated products sold by companies like IBM, BEA Systems Inc.
695835
JBoss on Monday is shipping JBoss Application Server 4.0, which the company is billing as the first open source application server certified as compatible with the J2EE 1.4 platform.
542803
According to this quick post on the Zend Developer Zone today, the Zend Framework project has a new leader to take the place of Jayson Maynard when he left.    After a difficult search, we have found the seasoned veteran we need to track, manage, and coordinate our ever growing group of contributors and Zend liaisons, and our lengthy list of components and sub-projects on our published roadmap for ZF 1.0, and beyond.   Fortunately, we were introduced to Bill Karwin. Bill is up to this challenge, having performed similar project organization duties at several companies, including Borland and Lutris Technologies. He is also committed to the open-source community, and is a member of the MySQL Guild.    Cal has some other nice things to say about Bill, including a compliment on Bill's grasp on the Zend Framework project.
266499
DynamicWebPages.de has a new posting today - an interview with Bjorn Schotte, a founder of the ThinkPHP group.
692828
Jimmy Kuo, a former McAfee fellow, will join the security industry newcomer as senior security researcher.
708885
Former executives from companies such as Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, and Oracle this week are formally launching a venture called Cassatt, which is endeavoring to automate IT operations, leverage commodity hardware and software, and govern network compute cycles in a grid-like manner.
307797
A safe bet? Comment I met with Gerry Cohen last week, the founder CEO of BI vendor Information Builders (IB). After 30 years in the business he still has an infectious enthusiasm for software. As has Jim Goodnight, the founder CEO of SAS, and Michael Saylor, the founder CEO of MicroStrategy, who founded his company in 1989. Between them, this triumvirate of founder CEOs account for $2.3bn of worldwide annual BI industry sales: about one-third of the whole BI market.â¦
98831
Hewlett-Packard Co. and open-source middleware vendor JBoss Inc. on Friday said that HP will now provide first-line support for JBoss&#39; open-source Java application server.