(Credit:
Jon Williams)
A few weeks ago Steve Pearson (CBS) and Jon Williams (Kaplan Test) keynoted the Open Source Business Conference. In the past week, both have opted to leave their employers to join other companies.
There must have been something in the water at OSBC. :-)
Steve hasn't told me where he's going, but Jon will be joining iVillage as its new CTO. If NBC's iVillage was looking for an open source savvy, innovative and entrepreneurial CTO, it couldn't have done any better.
At any rate, if you want a new job, please ask me about OSBC keynote opportunities.
(Credit:
Matt Asay)
I've known Jon Williams, chief technology officer of Kaplan Test, for a few years, and have always been impressed by his active involvement in the technology world. He blogs. He helps to run a New York CTO breakfast club. He keeps involved with various open-source communities. He's an ideal CTO.
Given Jon's background, one statement that he made in his opening remarks particularly impressed me:
I don't use open source because it's free....I use open source because it works.
Jon then offered up several key benefits derived from open source at Kaplan Test:
... Read more
Sometimes the good guys win.
I was really happy to see Red Hat announce that Rivet Logic won the JBoss Innovator of the Year Award for 2008. I'm biased in this one (see below), but it's an exceptional award for an exceptional piece of work by (you guessed it) an exceptional group of people.
What was the winning application?
...a next-generation platform for the www.kaptest.com site that can deliver personalized applications and dynamic, targeted content. The results include a 26x performance improvement over the legacy content authoring/delivery system, much faster page load times and a "fresher" web presence for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.
100% open source. I know the Kaplan team well, as well as the Rivet Logic team. This award couldn't have happened to a better group of people. Congratulations!
... Read moreIt's one thing to listen to vendors talk about the rise and importance of open source. It's quite another - and much more interesting - to hear customers talking about it.
I was fortunate to spend some time with Jon Williams, Chief Technology Officer at Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions, the multi-billion dollar test preparation company. Jon is keynoting this year's Open Source Business Conference and gave me a sneak preview of what he'll be discussing at OSBC. I've worked with Jon over the past year and find him to be one of the industry's most interesting visionaries in enterprise software.
That comes through loud and clear in this podcast in which Jon talks about how to introduce open source into an organization, where it fits, how to integrate it with proprietary software (and proprietary mindsets), and other things. Well worth a listen for anyone who wants to see where open source is going next.
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