Bickel Blog

In 1996 we started a project called the Bluestone (actually Sapphire at the time) Application Manager. Kevin Minder led the project, Larry McCay and Rich Friedman were also key guys on the project as well. We felt it was very important to have Management tightly tied to our middleware. We saw tremendous synergies where customers could go way beyond simple Systems Management and move toward Application Management. I remember Kevin talking with me about how we could actually build something that was way better than things like Tivoli. Here is a link to a snapshot of the old Bluestone site - Fast forward to 2002 and when I first started working with Marc Fleury and JBoss. In my first presentation to Marc on my recommendations on where JBoss could go I had a slide that said we needed to create something like the Red Hat Network for middleware. It would give us value that we could bundle in our Subscription and it would allow us to go from the developer side of the house into the op...

It looks like Mark Little is moving into the CTO role at the JBoss division in Red Hat as Sacha Labourey departs . This is a great move. Mark is very smart, has deep experience in enterprise level software, is very collaborative and has a quiet drive for success. Plus Mark comes from Newcastle , England - which I think is a pretty close translation from Neuchatel , Switzerland where Sacha is from. I first met Mark when Rich Friedman and I went to Newcastle to try to convince Arjuna Labs to join forces with Bluestone about 10 years ago. Mark was the genius CTO who was one of the key guys on an amazing team that had developed a Java Transacti on Processing technology. Mark was one of the leading, recognized industry experts in this field. He was the one who drilled us with questions across the board - technology, people, processes, customers, culture. Mark had an understanding far beyond the details of the code and into the whole complex set of people, customers, partners and ma...

Sacha Labourey announced today that he is moving on from Red Hat - JBoss. There were a ton of great people who helped make JBoss successful. Of course Marc Fleury, the smart and dynamic founder. Scott Stark who made JBoss a real product with excellent stability. Fantastic technical project leads like Bill Burke, Adrian Brock, Gavin King, Bela Ban, Ivelin Ivanov, Rich Friedman and so many more. And great business people like Tom Leonard, Rob Bearden, Joe McGonnell, Brad Murdoch, Shaun Connolly and of course the original JBoss Sales-Guy Ben Sabrin. But I would say Sacha Labourey had as much impact as anyone over the years at JBoss. Sacha started like all early people with JBoss – as a contributor. He wrote the first implementation of clustering with JBoss. That capability is what moved JBoss from a simple developer tool and low end app server to something that could seriously compete with WebLogic and WebSphere. That early work established his technical smarts, but it also was the...