Ostensibly, SpringSource today announced the acquisition of Covalent to beef up its support for the Apache-sponsored project Tomcat. The problem with such thinking is that if this is the real reason, SpringSource got very little for its money.
There's no doubt that Spring+Apache is a recipe for success. In my own experience, I've seen widespread adoption of both, and often together (not the least being within the product my company, Alfresco, ships). Rod Johnson, CEO and founder of SpringSource, states:
We see Apache code being used by many of our customer accounts--the Apache Web server, Tomcat, Web services frameworks, Active MQ and a slew of other Apache technologies. We see pent-up demand for services from folks using Spring and Apache technologies.
It's unclear how an acquisition furthers this, since the best that SpringSource has acquired is a few developers associated with the project, but not the project itself.
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This next installment has us "In the trenches with...Ryan Morgan of Hyperic. When I asked Javier for his recommendation on an "unsung hero" at Hyperic he suggested Ryan. I demurred once I heard Ryan's title (Chief Software Architect). But Javier insisted, informing me that Ryan had grown with the company. He wasn't blessed with executive status from Day One, but instead proved himself over time.
Since that's precisely the sort of tenacity that I was looking for in this series, I capitulated. Here's a guy who has done just about everything at Hyperic (including the accounting), and who helped to see the company through its sometimes rough transition from Covalent Technologies to Hyperic. Talk about bootstrapping....
Ryan is particularly interesting because he represents the next (people) wave of open source: developers and business people who have never known anything beyond open source. Ryan's first job was an open source company. I suspect his last will be, too.
Name, company, title, and what you actually do
Ryan Morgan, Co-founder and Chief Software Architect, Hyperic. My primary role at Hyperic is the technical lead for Hyperic's main product, Hyperic HQ. In addition to those responsibilities I frequently engage with Hyperic's larger customers to ensure their HQ deployments are successful. I'm also an active member of Hyperic's online community. Prior to Hyperic raising funding I also managed Hyperic's books, though I think that had more to do with being the son of a CPA than it did my financial skills.
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Covalent was one of the pioneers in commercial open source. Unfortunately, Covalent suffered through the dot-com bubble, along with the rest of the industry. Today, Covalent lives on under the guidance of Mark Brewer (as well as in Hyperic, which spun out of Covalent several years ago).
I caught up with Mark for our fifteenth installment of the Open Source CEO Series, hoping to glean some lessons from an open source company that rose, then fell, and is rising again. I met him in 2003/04 to discuss a possible investment, but Mark and team opted to bootstrap their way back to profitability, and have done exceptionally well for themselves.
Name, position, and company of executive
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Mark Brewer, CEO, Covalent Technologies.
For the second installment in the Open Source CEO Series, I caught up with Javier Soltero, CEO and Co-founder of Hyperic. Javier is a highly pragmatic open sourceror, fully buying into the open source ethos but not forgetting that customers buy value, not source code.
Name, position, and company of executive
Javier A. Soltero, CEO and Co-founder, HypericYear company was founded and year you joined it
Hyperic was founded in 2004. Coincidentally, I joined that same year. :-)Stage of funding and venture firms that have invested
Series B (closed 6/07). Investors: Accel Partners & Benchmark CapitalBackground prior to current company
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I was Chief Architect at Covalent in charge of developing products to help manage Apache and its related technology stack (Tomcat, etc.). We built the first version of what later became Hyperic HQ at Covalent in 2003 and prior to that shipped a number of management technologies for Apache/Tomcat including a configuration and provisioning system. Before that, I was senior engineer at Backflip.com (a 5-years-ahead-of-its-time high-profile bookmark sharing/social network founded by ex-Netscape people). It was at Backflip that I had my first brush with the problem of managing a large scale online service business. I also met two of my co-founders (Charles and Doug) while at Backflip. Prior to that, I was at Netscape, helping create the internet infrastructure technologies that most people today take for granted :)
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