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...

Spring announced today that they acquired Hyperic (I have been on the board at Hyperic since 2006 and known them since JBoss decided to use HQ as the foundation of the JBoss Network in 2005). This is the future. The past has been about J2EE Application Servers, Operating Systems, Servers, heavy-weight Enterprise Middleware and Systems Management. The past has burdened companies with high costs and inflexible environments that do not allow them to respond to market and customer dynamics. Over the past couple of years and into the next several years a new architecture has taken hold. Built around the flexibility of the Internet. Cloud Services. Virtualization. These are the things that let companies take advantage of rapid market shifts and to achieve much lower cost levels. Traditional Middleware and Systems Management have not kept up with this new environment. The combination of Spring and Hyperic provides the Internet Infrastructure for new business applications to be deploy...