Startups

The Open Source CEO: Javier Soltero, Hyperic (Part 2)

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, Hyperic

Year 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 Capital

Background prior to current company 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 :)… Read more

The Open Source CEO: Dave Rosenberg, MuleSource (Part 1)

I asked a range of open source CEOs to comment on some of the surprises and challenges associated with running an open source company. I figured it would be an interesting exercise since many of them came from proprietary software companies, and so would have a good idea of whether the grass is, in fact, any greener on the open source side of the fence.

In ease case, I asked for the following information:

Name, position, and company of executive Year company was founded and year you joined it Stage of funding and names of venture firms that have invested Background prior to current company (Positions held and/or something that led you to open source/where you are now) Biggest surprise you?ve encountered in your role with your company Hardest challenge you?ve had so far at your open source company If you could start over again from scratch, what would you do differently? Top three pieces of advice for would-be open source CEOs

I got a wide variety of responses, which I'll be showcasing here at The Open Road over the next few days.

I decided to start off the series with my good friend and former co-blogger (at InfoWorld's Open Sources blog), Dave Rosenberg, CEO and co-founder of MuleSource:… Read more

Fox teams up with Brightcove

Brightcove, an internet video company, issued a press release yesterday, detailing a new relationship with Fox to serve up their web video. Brightcove's video publishing service allows content providers to insert their own ads into video streams in exchange for a fee, paid to Brightcove. The full details on the capabilities of Brightcove's platform can be found here.

Fox plans to distribute their content on both their own website and also on some of their affiliates' sites. This will help Fox to keep a consistent experience on their own website, while also allowing them to easily push their … Read more

Open source demand generation goes 2.0

Today, Loopfuse announced that it has released the 2.0 version of its open source demand generation product. In case you missed David Skok's exceptional OSBC presentation (Detailing lessons learned from JBoss' success, and an upgrade on my own presentation on this same subject). [Note: If you're prompted for a user name/password, try conference/attendee.]

What is demand generation? If you're an open source company, it's your lifeblood. Open source companies grow up and live online. If you're not using a demand generation tool like Loopfuse (or Eloqua - proprietary and pricey but very … Read more

MySQL does not scale

Well, not very much. I mean, who wants to only scale to hundreds of millions of page views?

Aside from Oracle, that is? ;-)

As Tim notes, MySQL is in the middle of its "12 Days of Scale-out," which is designed to show how MySQL, that little database that could, is delivering monster-sized performance for some of the biggest names on the planet.

Like Wikipedia, for example, which uses MySQL to service:

More than 154 million annual visitors More than 5 million articles More than 290,000 contributors Nearly half a million edits each day 25,000 SQL … Read more

Welcome to the Report

Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Harrison Hoffman, a co-founder and writer for the Windows Live news site LiveSide.net and a current student at the University of Miami. I decided to take on this new project because I wanted to write about a wider variety of web services and talk about the whole picture instead of just a small part of it.

My goal with The Web Services Report is to provide news, opinion, and analysis on what's going on in the world of web services. I may be writing about the big players like Microsoft, Yahoo, … Read more