The Open Road

What is the value of an open-source asset? Over the past several years, and most recently with SpringSource, we've seen a number of open-source companies acquired at valuations of 10x or better. Did the buyers get their money's worth?

It's a tricky question to answer--and likely depends upon far more data than I have at my disposal. It also depends on the acquiring company executing, which has not been the case with Yahoo (which bought Zimbra) or Sun Microsystems (which bought MySQL). No open-source company can offer a panacea for an acquiring company's failure to execute.

But after talking with a range of the companies involved, it would appear that the answer is "yes"--open-source acquisitions are paying good dividends.

Consider:

• JBoss, bought by Red Hat for $350 million at a valuation 15 times sales (i.e., a 15x valuation), has gone on to grow twice as fast as Red Hat's core Linux business and is the key to its ability to sell strategic value to CIOs, rather than simply commodity Linux servers.
• XenSource, inarguably the richest acquisition at 166x, was doubling its customer count every quarter at the time Citrix bought it for $500 million. This would be less significant except that the company had already pulled in 1,000 customers. Compounding that number...? That sort of growth is hard to hard and continues to feed Citrix today. XenSource's valuation was overly rich but then, it was bought on the heels of VMware's explosive IPO. Some valuation hubris was to be expected.
• Zimbra, which Yahoo paid $350 million to acquire, has largely been buried in the belly of a company that has yet to figure out what it wants to do when it grows up (and out of Google's shadow). Even so, the company, which was doing north of $20 million at the time of acquisition, continues to grow quarter after quarter. Yahoo may not know what to do with Zimbra, but Zimbra's customers apparently do: buy more.
• And then there's MySQL. Ironically, Sun's $1 billion acquisition of MySQL, which was ridiculed as dramatically rich in valuation, has the lowest multiple of the lot, given that MySQL recorded sales of over $90 million the year it was acquired. Despite Sun's myriad problems over the past year, MySQL is growing, recording some of its best quarters ever.

Open-source assets, then, are growth assets. And their growth appears to be hard to check, even in cases of significant mismanagement. Perhaps this is the nature of open source: the company behind it may falter, but ultimately, the success of the project is only a download away, provided that the development community remains vibrant (and, in each of the examples above, it has).

So long as development continues, so will downloads. If downloads continue, there really should be no reason that a company can't benefit from it. It may derive substantial or anemic benefits, but it should benefit.

Looking around, it's hard to find a company that, on balance, isn't happy with its open-source investments. If open source didn't work, we'd expect to see companies exit, but in addition to the companies mentioned above, Oracle (Sleepycat), IBM (Gluecode), Cisco (Jabber), and others have increasingly bought into open source, and none shows any signs of abating its interest in increasing its open-source activities.

One might think that buying an open-source asset, rich in adoption but relatively light in monetization, would be a poor investment. Based on the data I've seen, however, this supposition is wrong.

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Others and I have made much of VMware's acquisition of SpringSource for $420 million, but one crucial point has been overlooked: this is the first big acquisition of a company that depends on the Apache license.

Yes, we've seen smaller acquisitions of open-source companies that rely on Apache-style licensing. IBM acquired Gluecode (Geronimo project), SpringSource bought Covalent (Tomcat), Oracle acquired Sleepycat (Sleepycat, BSD license), and there have likely been others that I'm simply not remembering.

But the big, head-turning deals? GNU General Public License (GPL). Every one of them.

Nearly every other big open-source acquisition, from JBoss ($350 million) to MySQL ($1 billion) to XenSource ($500 million), has involved the GPL. Even Zimbra ($350 million), while not GPL, fits the mold because it used an attribution clause with an MPL license that was designed to accomplish GPL-esque ambitions.

The GPL has been prominent for good reason. It's accepted wisdom in the commercial open-source crowd that it's difficult to directly monetize Apache-licensed software, and that the GPL, what with its capitalist urge for control, is a better tool for the financially inclined.

The SpringSource acquisition turns this "wisdom" on its head.

Perhaps this is because our notion of "monetizing open source" has expanded, as Eric Barroca astutely argues. The GPL is great for dual-licensing and support-based businesses, but it's not very adept at incorporating proprietary software in the way that IBM does, for example, or Day Software, as Kevin Cochrane notes.

In other words, we're getting beyond open source as a religious coda, the secret handshake that makes one part of The Club, and instead are focused on building businesses that provide greater transparency and value for customers. I suspect we'll therefore see more Apache and less GPL going forward, with companies contributing significant parts of their product/business to open source, while delivering the rest via proprietary licensing.

IBM already does this. So, frankly, does Microsoft (though still to a small degree). I think we'll see a lot more.

The reason is that customers have never been as religious about open source as the vendors/communities that develop it, a lesson I was taught by a crowd of CTOs in New York and which is highlighted in a recent Enterprise Systems Journal article.

But it's also a function of open source's growing importance in the software ecosystem. As more money pours into open source--IDC projects $8.1 billion in open-source revenues by 2013--there will be increasing pressure to make it pay, as InfoWorld recently wrote:

As the open source market continues marching away from its roots--the lone developer who creates a useful product as a labor of love--appreciation for the idealism that lies at the GPL's heart is diminishing. Businesses that view open source development as a path to a profitable future rather than as an altruistic mission are increasingly balking at what they view as the license's excessively restrictive aspects concerning code improvements.

Such thinking, among other considerations, led Appcelerator to drop the GPL for Apache, and I believe we'll see more. We just had a significant demonstration that you can make money with Apache-licensed software. SpringSource was doubling sales every year with Apache, and had a $420 million outcome as a result of both its sales and its community, which may be easier to come by with an Apache license than GPL, at least for commercial open-source projects.

It's telling, for example, that InfoWorld's attempts to interview Richard Stallman, founder of the GPL, were stymied by his "demand(ing) control of what (InfoWorld) published." You don't grow a community with that emphasis on control of the outcome.

IBM proved long ago that it's possible to build billion-dollar businesses with Apache. But SpringSource is the first start-up to suggest that Apache isn't simply a way for big companies to create complements to proprietary cores. Sometimes an Apache core is worth something, too. At least $420 million, by SpringSource's reckoning.

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No other investor has had as much success in open-source software as Peter Fenton, general partner at Benchmark Capital.

A competitive triathlete, Fenton has turned the standard marathon of open-source business-building into a sprint, churning out four big open-source sales--JBoss ($350 million), Zimbra ($350 million), XenSource ($500 million), and SpringSource ($420 million)--while most investors have yet to turn a profit on any.

Not that Fenton is a one-trick pony. He also just sold FriendFeed to Facebook and sits on the board of Twitter. It's fair to say that Fenton can now afford a second Aston Martin.

But Fenton is still busy, sitting on the boards of open-source companies Pentaho, Terracotta, and Engine Yard. He's also willing to share the secrets to his open-source success, telling The Wall Street Journal the key to building a winning open-source business.

Spoiler? Build a direct line to your customers using open source and then ensure an excellent product to pave the way to adoption, then usage, then sales. According to the Journal article:

Rather than "expensive sales efforts and negotiations with the upper management to get the most money possible," the people that will be using the software can easily download and try the product. This helps the best products proliferate and weeds out the underperformers.

"If you don't have the best product, you're not going to make it in open-source," unlike traditional enterprise software, where customers often flock to good-enough products.

Having a well-received product not only results in plenty of downloads, users and developers, it also makes the sales process that much easier. With SpringSource, "anyone the company sold to was already using the product," he said.

Sounds easy, right? Well, no, not if you've ever been involved in an open-source business. Building a great product is hard enough, but doing so in a transparent fashion while encouraging active adoption without appearing faux to your community...? That's hard.

Venture investing may be more art than science to some, but Fenton has done more than most to turn open-source investing into a science, as VentureBeat reports. For instance, many open-source companies are ecstatic to have widespread adoption, but Fenton is careful to call out the difference between adoption and actual usage, as he does in this Benchmark presentation (PDF).

In this presentation Fenton calls out two strategies for investing in either "farm-raised" or "free-range" businesses. Think of these categories as company-led (e.g., Zimbra) or community-led (e.g., SpringSource) open-source businesses. Neither is better than the other: they simply refer to whether an open-source community predates a company set up to monetize it.

The strategies Fenton takes depends. For "free range," it looks like this:

For "farm raised," Fenton's strategy looks like this:

All of which means your next open-source investment or company should be a snap, right? Maybe not. It's one thing to call the correct shots--and quite another to make them. Part of the reason Fenton has been so successful is that he has invested in exceptional operators at each company, including Marc Fleury and Rob Bearden (JBoss); Satish Dharmaraj, Scott Dietzen, Andy Pflaum, and John Robb (Zimbra); and Rod Johnson and Rob Bearden (SpringSource), among others.

Perhaps this is really the key to Fenton's success, after all is said and done: he knows how to attract top-tier entrepreneurs to top-tier open-source communities. That's not something one accomplishes with a jog or casual bike ride. That's the work of a triathlete, which makes Fenton perfect for the job.

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I've been writing a lot lately about SpringSource, largely because it has demonstrated a big vision (nothing less than the redefinition of the application server and an end-to-end application story), and so I wasn't terribly surprised today to see VMware buy SpringSource for $420 million. On roughly $20 million in sales, much of that services, it's a rich valuation, but one that is absolutely deserved given SpringSource's potential.

In fact, it's almost certain that SpringSource sold too early, at least as measured the size of potential exits it could have had given a bit more time. Like Zimbra before it, SpringSource had unbounded potential to shake up the application server and development market.

I remember talking to Peter Fenton, partner with Benchmark Capital and an investor in both SpringSource and Zimbra. He indicated that the firm had made tremendous efforts to keep Zimbra from selling to Yahoo as it still had so much potential to build toward an even bigger valuation.

Happy as Fenton is with the SpringSource acquisition, I wonder if he feels the same as he did about Zimbra. So much money left on the table.

Indeed, I found out about the SpringSource acquisition back in July, apparently even before formal discussions started between the companies (due to a leaky source at VMware). SpringSource CEO Rob Bearden denied the existence of acquisition discussions between the two companies and Rod Johnson, the company's founder and CEO, was on vacation at the time.

But in denying the rumors, Bearden, COO at SpringSource, suggested that given "one more year...(SpringSource) will be bigger than MySQL," acquired by Sun for $1 billion.

I think Bearden was right. The company's valuation has been soaring due to efficiently run operations (Bearden) and a big vision for the company's prospects (Johnson and others). It was only a matter of time before it IPO'd or was acquired.

I had hoped, however, that Red Hat would complement its JBoss business with SpringSource, but it's not to be, and this doesn't bode well for Red Hat, on two counts.

First, with every acquisition of a leading open-source company by anyone other than Red Hat, Red Hat becomes more and more isolated. Other companies are integrating open source into their business strategies. Red Hat's differentiation as "the" open source company doesn't have much of a shelf life left.

Second, SpringSource's ubiquitous Spring Framework already threatened Red Hat's booming JBoss business. But add VMware's leading virtualization technology and suddenly Red Hat is under siege by a highly credible and disruptive competitor that could well outflank it.

Johnson describes the offering:

Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds. A solution that exploits knowledge of the application structure, and collaboration with middleware and management components, to ensure optimal efficiency and resiliency of the supporting virtual environment at deployment time and during runtime. A solution that will deliver a platform as a service (Paas) built around technologies that you already know, which can slash cost and complexity. A solution built around open, portable middleware technologies that can run on traditional Java EE application servers in a conventional data center and on Amazon EC2 and other elastic compute environments as well as on the VMware platform.

Here's what it looks like:

Astute observers will notice that the operating system, Red Hat's core competence, becomes increasingly less relevant in this world. Vendors like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and others have less to fear from this threat, because they're already building high-value solutions above the operating system.

Red Hat doesn't. Red Hat is exposed by this VMware and SpringSource combination. It needs to become more aggressive.

Red Hat is, of course, taking a leadership role in virtualization and increasingly cloud computing. But it will need to quickly move beyond its dependence on its operating system business to sell a larger, strategic story or it faces the prospect of being an excellent, limited basic infrastructure vendor.

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Some argue that open-source software can't innovate. In fact, one of the industry's former executives, Peter Yared, recently argued that "the only successful open-source companies sell commodities."

Yared clearly hasn't heard of SpringSource, an open-source application platform provider that is redefining the J2EE application server and, quite possibly, the future of open source.

Yared isn't alone in his beliefs. A friend recently wrote me to suggest that open source is at its best when disrupting big, profitable markets:

Commercial open source is a (commodity) replacement market. When it is not (i.e., people are building new, never-done-before cool/future-proof apps with open-source technology), then it is a pure-play Internet-based business model, one that is becoming so specific/demanding that people will want full control and (to) develop their own stuff, e.g., Google, Facebook, and others that heavily use open source to build their Web services.

SpringSource and its ubiquitous Spring Framework, however, promise something different. Something much more ambitious. Not only does Spring challenge the status quo in application development, deployment, and management (Hyperic), but SpringSource is proving that commercial open source can peacefully coexist with community involvement.

In a conversation with Spring creator and SpringSource founder Rod Johnson, he clarified SpringSource's competitive differentiation:

The essence of SpringSource is that we're not a commodity play but have a far more ambitious agenda. We're not interested in replicating what closed-source vendors already offer, at lower price: We are providing a superior experience to developers and operations teams--for example, in our integrated approach to unifying the application life cycle from developer desktop to the data center--which doesn't presently exist in Java.

Of course, our offerings are also leaner (more productive and faster), cheaper and more open than those of the old incumbents, and that's a huge selling point in today's market. But we're focused on being the enterprise Java leader--and not merely in open source.

SpringSource isn't simply replacing IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, or Red Hat JBoss application servers. It is actually doing much more, and it offers, in my opinion, the best example of just how disruptive an open-source vendor can be precisely because SpringSource isn't seeking to be the open-source leader in Java, but the leader, period.

Gartner estimates that there are currently at least 2 million Spring developers, an impressive number suggesting that the Java community is looking to Spring to help it migrate Java applications onto lighter-weight containers (Tc Server), across highly virtualized environments, and ultimately to the cloud. Given SpringSource's strong financial performance, the company seems to be doing a good job of monetizing a significant percentage of that Spring adoption.

After meeting with the SpringSource executive team at its San Mateo, Calif., offices a few weeks ago to discuss its strategy, I'm convinced that the company is on track to improve that percentage significantly too.

We're at the point when it's not enough to be "the Red Hat of (CRM, ECM, ERP, etc.)." In a bad economy that sees open-source solutions adopted at an ever-increasing pace, now growing at a 22 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate), according to IDC, it's time for open-source vendors to lead and develop markets, not simply follow in the wake of established proprietary vendors, picking up their crumbs.

SpringSource is demonstrating how it can be done. It's an aggressive company with the finances, management, and product ambition to become a very big player in enterprise IT within just a few short years. It's a company that Microsoft should fear and that Oracle or IBM should buy.

Of course, SpringSource being SpringSource, it might actually be planning to buy Oracle or IBM instead.

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There was a time when vendors knew how to color inside the lines. A database vendor sold databases. An operating system vendor peddled operating systems. And application server vendors were in the business of selling application servers.

Customers knew what "application server" meant, which is what paved the way for low-cost, high-value open-source application servers like JBoss, Geronimo, and others to arise. The category was well understood. The only thing the customer had to decide was whether she wished to overspend on a brand-name application server or buy into an open-source upstart.

As the economy continues to pressure IT budgets, a new breed of application server is rising, one that doesn't color nicely within the lines of the traditional "app server" definition.

First there was SpringSource, which in April 2008 claimed it had developed the first "proper Java application server" to hit the market in more than 10 years. IBM, Oracle, and Red Hat (JBoss) must have found this surprising, given that "proper Java application servers" were what they presumed to be selling to their customers.

SpringSource, pressing the issue further, this week announced Spring Roo, an "interactive, lightweight, user-customizable tooling that enables rapid delivery of high-performance enterprise Java applications." At just 4MB, Spring Roo is tiny, but its promise is big: "working applications within 10 minutes of finishing the download" (video here).

Red Hat is taking notice of SpringSource's moves, but SpringSource founder Rod Johnson is dismissive of Red Hat's ability to compete:

Red Hat recently announced a defensive move (JBoss Open Choice strategy) motivated by trying to play catch-up with SpringSource. Clearly the momentum of SpringSource tc Server and dm Server has Red Hat worried, along with the continued advance of the Spring Framework as the de facto standard component model for enterprise Java.

The "JBoss Open Choice strategy" appears to be a repackaging, rather than new technology, which attempts to position JBoss as still relevant in a brave new world of changing requirements. On a positive note, it appears Red Hat has finally realized that many developers and customers have long since moved away from the full Java EE stack; that the traditional heavyweight application server has declined in importance; and that the Spring programming model is important to their customer base.

The paint is barely dry on JBoss' incursion into IBM's and Oracle's application server territory, and already it's under attack from SpringSource, which is positioning JBoss as old technology, despite barely being out of its teens. It's a sharp attack, but perhaps a sign of open-source competition to come.

Consider MindTouch. The entire idea of a Java application server got a shaking this week from MindTouch, which announced a new application packaging feature for its collaboration platform, as TechCrunch reports. This feature:

(A)llows developers to create a compressed file for import into other MindTouch instances, letting enterprise users install add-on applications easily. This addition represents MindTouch's ambitions to become an application platform where installing applications (is) as easy as adding Firefox add-ons.

This may not sound very groundbreaking, until you consider that MindTouch is essentially announcing that it has turned the wiki into an application platform. Until last year MindTouch was mostly known for its DekiWiki technology. This application-packaging technology basically allows customers to build on wiki collaboration, which is much more than just a MediaWiki-style wiki, as ReadWriteWeb notes.

Neither SpringSource nor MindTouch fit the old application server mold, but it's not clear customers should care. Enterprises just want to get work done.

Just as Google is shaking up e-mail with Wave and Wolfram Alpha is redefining a corner of search, so too are SpringSource and MindTouch redefining what application server means for the modern enterprise, while open-source companies like Acquia redefine Web content management, Marketcetera pushes the envelope on financial trading platforms, etc.

Open source is the new innovator, and not merely the commodifying force in the market.

Indeed, with traditional software markets perhaps reaching a critical saturation point, we may see much more "coloring outside the lines" in enterprise software from open-source projects and companies. Oracle's response has been to consolidate, but others seem to be responding with a different strategy: innovation.

Disclosure: I am an adviser to MindTouch. Red Hat is a business partner. Acquia is in some ways a competitor.

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Even as CIOs accelerate adoption of open source in an effort to trim costs and improve innovation, the world's top system integrators (SIs) have largely played it safe on the sidelines. Accenture, given its close partnership with Microsoft, has perhaps been one of the most conservative SIs when it comes to open source.

Or so it has appeared. Despite a partnership with SpringSource, an open-source infrastructure leader, Accenture's open-source activities have largely gone unnoticed. Even Accenture's Innovation Center for Open Source, a collaboration with Red Hat and other open-source vendors, was more whispered about than promoted.

I caught up with Alex Wied, senior manager at Accenture and head of its Innovation Center for Open Source, and Tony Roby, partner in Accenture's Global Architecture and Core Technologies group, to find out what, exactly, Accenture has been doing with open source, and how the global consulting firm expects to use open source going forward. They collaborated on the answers to my questions below.

Accenture is not the first company that comes to mind when one thinks of open source. After all, you have a joint venture with Microsoft and have been pretty quiet on open source. Is open source alive and well at Accenture? If so, what are the areas of focus for Accenture?

I'm curious to find out why that is the case! Accenture has strong relationships with many leading technology companies--that is what our clients expect.

Open source is growing within both Accenture and our client base. We continue to be substantial users of open source, particularly in custom Java development, and our focus is expanding beyond this space to cover the gamut of open source portals, content management, business intelligence and data management. We also continue to contribute to open-source projects where we expect the results to benefit our clients.

Is open source client-led or Accenture-led? Meaning, are your customers asking for it or are you embracing open-source solutions for your own reasons? If so, what are those reasons? If clients are asking for it, what reasons do they cite?

It's a mixture. There is a tremendous amount of education still to be done regarding open source. We have clients who still have policies not to use open source at all; others who want to use open source wherever possible. But the majority is in between: they are open to using whatever makes most sense from a technical and commercial perspective.

What is clear is that the current economy is driving many who were ambivalent about open source to explore its potential more closely. Regardless of the economic environment, Accenture is a strong open-source advocate and will continue to work with our clients to help them achieve business benefits with it.

Is "vendor lock-in" a serious concern for your clients? If they had to choose between zero cost and 100 percent lock-in or a hefty cost and no lock-in, which would they choose? Or is that even a fair question?

Yes and no. No one wants to be locked in, particularly if that lock in results in ever-increasing expenditure that is disconnected from the value being realized.

But our clients in general look for a balance. "One throat to choke" is high up in the requirements for making major technology investments and is often prioritized over "lock-in." Also, in the context of very large projects, the cost of the software compared to everything else is frequently a small part of the equation.

Nevertheless, we are seeing a noticeable increase in the use of open source, driven largely by the "free" aspect. Few are fooled by the notion of open source being free (as in no cost): lower cost, flexibility and the ability to be supported at modest cost are key drivers of the increased uptake.

Are there particular open-source projects that are of interest to you/Accenture? Which ones, and why?

We do a lot of work with the Spring Framework, so I would say that has historically had the bulk of our interest. That said, we have people active in a number of community projects and we are making increasing use of Alfresco, Liferay, and Talend, to name a few in the technology area.

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SpringSource announced Monday its acquisition of Hyperic, a move that signals a new phase of commercial open-source competition.

Until recently, open-source vendors like SpringSource seemed content to play the low-cost commodity foil to the broader product portfolios of their proprietary peers. No more.

SpringSource, the company behind the Spring Framework, the leading open-source application framework for Java, has been nudging beyond its roots for some time. Most recently, SpringSource announced commercial support for Tomcat, arguably the world's most prevalent Java application server. It has also released tools to expedite and facilitate the development of Java applications.

In these ways, it has continued its march toward a more complete Java development model and, in the process, has girded its ability to monetize the otherwise free and open-source Spring Framework. With over half the Fortune 2000 as users of the Spring Framework, it is this ability to turn users into paying customers that has been perhaps most critical to SpringSource's product plans.

With Hyperic, SpringSource completes its vision to provide a "complete suite of software products that accelerate the entire build, run, manage enterprise Java application lifecycle," and moves from framework provider to a true solution provider--one that competes directly with IBM and Microsoft.

The acquisition of Hyperic cements a longstanding partnership between the two companies. SpringSource has been OEM'ing Hyperic's technology since 2007. By acquiring Hyperic, however, SpringSource makes it possible to fully manage the applications that its customers build using the Spring Framework.

As Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic, told me in a phone interview:

The SpringSource philosophy has always been about making it easier to build enterprise-grade Java applications. But the pillar of this acquisition is about offering the full application lifecycle: build the applications, run those applications, and then manage those applications using Hyperic.

This is more than a marriage of code. It's about merging the best people in IT management with the best in Java application development. It gives us broader and deeper visibility up and down the software stack and across a company's network and data center, including virtualization and cloud computing environments. It means that we've just reduced and, in some cases, eliminated the gap between application development and IT operations.

Soltero will become CTO of management products with SpringSource.

I asked Soltero about speculation that this acquisition was simply the fulfillment of a whim on the part of Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has invested in both SpringSource and Hyperic and is an active investor in a range of open-source companies. As Soltero explained it, while "Benchmark is of course happy with the combination," it was not involved in promoting it and, for legal reasons, could not be involved.

Regardless, the SpringSource/Hyperic combination creates a clear and present danger to IBM and Microsoft, two companies that have largely stood alone in the ability to build, run, and manage applications. It's also a significant boon to companies looking to open source to save money and improve productivity.

Is it a sign of good things to come from not only SpringSource, but also open source, generally? Time will tell, but I suspect we're on the cusp of an aggressive and ambitious new phase in open-source competition.

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MuleSource, the company behind the top open-source enterprise service bus (ESB) and a leading open-source service-oriented architecture (SOA) vendor, has been without a chief executive for some time, having lost the services of CNET blogger Dave Rosenberg in September. On Monday, the company announced the appointment of Greg Schott as its new CEO.

Schott may familiar to those who follow the sometimes-incestuous open-source talent pool. That's because Schott joins MuleSource from SpringSource, where he was senior vice president of marketing.

Prior to joining SpringSource, Schott had served as senior vice president of marketing and vice president of corporate development at Agile Software, which Oracle acquired in 2007.

At SpringSource, Schott led the company's rebranding efforts from Interface21 to SpringSource, as well as the complete overhaul of the company's marketing, a difficult feat in a start-up with such impressive engineering chops as SpringSource has.

Schott joins MuleSource at a good time. The company has delivered 100 percent year-over-year revenue growth and now counts more than 2,000 enterprise deployments at major enterprises like Wal-Mart Stores. The company just completed its best quarter ever, and it named MySQL sales executive Mark Burton to its board of directors.

Schott is a good fit for engineering-heavy MuleSource. He has technical chops, and a wealth of marketing and operations experience. I'm biased, as I'm an adviser to the company, but I'm also a good friend of Rosenberg, MuleSource's former CEO and co-founder.

Disclosure: As noted above, I am an adviser to MuleSource.

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