Bickel Blog

The Boston Globe broke the news this morning . CloudBees has taken a round of financing led by Matrix Partners. While not quite the reunion of the Beatles, Sacha has brought together some of the characters from the JBoss experience – David Skok, Marc Fleury. I kind of feel like Ringo – not quite as cool as John, Paul and George… We had a number of discussions with different VC’s, and in the end decided that David had done so much to help JBoss be successful that it was the best way to go. He has a somewhat unique depth of experience from being an entrepreneur himself 5 times over. And of course his success as a VC is widely well regarded. One of the interesting things about this investment team that matches up well with the technology team we have in place is being prepared to run a marathon. We are building for the long run. Here's the official press release .

Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of the Hudson Open Source project woke up Monday morning and discovered he was no longer able to access the Source Code Repository to make commits. Oracle had decided to shut it down, as they are shutting down many projects in java.net to try to move it to their own infrastructure. Not only that, but the mailing lists were shut down as well. They said not to worry, they will have it up in a week. No notice, no transition plan, no respect for the open source community or the project creator. Fortunately KK knows open source better than Oracle. And KK knows how to run an open source infrastructure better. He and others in the community moved the mailing list archive and list to Google Groups and Nabble - http://hudson-labs.org/content/mailing-lists so there is better functionality and search capability than before. He moved the source code to Git - https://github.com/hudson/hudson . He did this all in a few hours. All completely open. Oracle is st...

It is no secret that CloudBees is building a Java Platform as a Service offering for release in 2011. But a lot of people who develop Java apps don’t really understand what that buys them, or how it is really any different than traditional middleware like JBoss or Spring. I thought our own running of Hudson as a Service on top of our pre-PaaS might be a good way to explain the differences. We will look at three levels – 1. Plain vanilla Hudson, 2. Nectar, the version of Hudson for larger on premise sites, and 3. CloudBees DEV@Cloud offering which includes Hudson as a Service built on our underlying PaaS. Then we will dig down to see what is happening underneath and what role the PaaS is playing in this (sorry in advance for the length of this blog). 1. Plain vanilla Hudson – on Premise. Hudson is the leading Continuous Integration server, created by our very own Kohsuke Kawaguchi (KK), and is used in over 25,000 organizations. It uses a Master-Agent architecture that makes it...

Several of my old friends have asked me about the CloudBees strategy with bringing KK, the creator and primary contributor to the Hudson open source community , on board. I figured I would write it down, since this is important stuff… It will be a similar strategy to what we did at JBoss. There are two key parts: Respect for the community, respect for the project leader. We want the community to thrive and grow. We actually coined the term “Professional Open Source” in recognition of the significance of the people who had the foresight to create a successful open source project and build it from nothing. Provide a business strategy that would drive the economics to keep investing in the project. We wanted to find a way to invest more in the project. We look for virtuous cycles. While at JBoss, Sacha, Marc and I worked closely to bring the leaders of a number of open source projects on board. The list includes Bela Ban of JGroups, Gavin King of Hibernate, Mark Little of Arjuna (...

I spent 6 hours yesterday at the Goldman Cloud conference . I figured I would write up the highlights... It was a full room of investors and a few industry insiders. The panelists were all mid-cap to large-cap firms. What was interesting is some of the missing companies. No IBM or HP, which I don't mind since they take such a portfolio view of the world and seem to not be on the cutting edge. But the big missing company was Amazon. It was funny to hear companies like Rackspace diss them as a niche vendor. The one data point I heard was Cloud Computing will grow to $44B (10% of IT spending) in 2013, up from $17B (5%) today. SaaS is big driver. CIOs accept it. One of the banks that was there talked about how they are doing private and public cloud now and saving about 20%. Brian Byun of VMWare was on two panels. I found him to be the brightest start int he room. Very direct and clear on their vision and obviously executing well. He had a numebr of statements in his first pane...

CloudBees announced today that it has joined forces with InfraDNA and Kohsuke Kawaguchi (KK). I've been trying to convince KK to join CloudBees since last spring. So I am happy. There are two reasons why I'm happy. First, KK is a great guy. Smart, driven in an easy going way, and someone who can create something out of nothing. The second reason is that CloudBees believes Hudson and Continuous Integration are the core of making the development - QA - build - release cycle more agile. Witness the rapid adoption of Hudson across Java, Ruby, PHP and .Net shops. Also witness the number of plug-ins (over 350) of the open source Hudson community. We felt we wanted to help make this community successful, and to provide innovation that allows this community to move toward the Cloud - offering them the opportunity of even further agility and cost savings. CloudBees is now offering a new product - Nectar . Nectar is a subscription offering for Hudson users. It provides: Suppor...

A lot of people scoffed at Salesforce Chatter when it came out. Of course with the vision we had back at Ringside that all apps should become social, and now my involvement with eXo, I have been a big believer in this for a long time. I was recently reminded of this when we were doing a sales review at eXo last week, and I heard how Chatter was actually being used by our sales and marketing teams. It turns out it was a natural adoption for them. And it results in more and better information being shared within the team. For example, when a sales rep updates info on a customer, others can see the update in their activity stream. The cross pollination of what is working and not is great. But also others can lend a hand if they happen to have better knowledge on something. The sales team says it is helping them and our prospects and customers. Then I happened to get an email from Salesforce that highlighted what customers were getting out of it: Collaborate privately and securely I...