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Fleury a no-show at SYS-CON conference
Dennis Callaghan, June 6, 2006 @ 1:08 pm ETWe weren’t even aware that Bob Bickel was still a JBoss employee until he filled in for JBoss CEO Marc Fleury to do the opening keynote at SYS-CON’s combo SOA WebServices Edge/Enterprise OpenSource/Real World AJAX conference in New York this morning. Donning Fleury’s new red beret, Bickel, once JBoss’s VP of strategy and corporate development and now an independent consultant for JBoss and other open-source companies, talked up the just closed acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat–ostensibly the reason Fleury was not able to attend–and predicted open-source middleware and infrastructure plays like Hyperic and the Asterisk project were the next big thing for commercial open source.
Of course Bickel, as he admitted, consults for Hyperic and a company he didn’t name that has built a business model on Asterisk (Digium perhaps?). He said there were “no good examples” of open source business applications yet, which must have given the folks at SugarCRM and CentricCRM, both exhibitors at the conference, pause.
After giving a final plug to JBoss’ microkernel design, Bickel made a quick exit without taking questions as a keynote booked for 50 minutes ended after barely a half hour. While there’s no question Bickel knows his way around building commercial open source business models and is increasingly in demand for that expertise, having a part-time consultant as a last-minute fill-in for a high-profile commercial open-source CEO–who was the star keynote at the conference, stands as a pretty big letdown for attendees. We trust Fleury will actually show up for JBoss World next week.
Comments (7) Categories: Software
Bob is no longer a JBoss employee, although he seems to have been called out of retirement to fill Marc’s speaking slot. My understanding is that all the JBoss crew are at an all-hands Red Hat orientation meeting and the timing must have been bad for Marc. Bob didn’t need to go to orientation, so he made a good alternative (all hypthothesis, of course). Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss closed last Friday, and that trumped the Sys-Con event, presumably.
Bob has posted on this blog before, so hopefully we can get him to post again and give us the details.
Raven is right. All full time JBoss employees were in Atlanta for a 2 day integration meeting with Red Hat. I did not have to go, and I kind of have a decent handle on the topic of open soruce business models – hence I was the logical fill-in. Marc really had to be at this employee meeting – we have about 200 employees all in Atlanta for this meeting. Remember, we are talking big changes for employees and it was important their CEO was there. Also remember that the timing of the closing of the Red Hat-JBoss acquisition was never an exact science – so the scheduling overlap was not meant as any level of disrespect for the conference, Sys-con or the attendees. While I will never have the charisma of Marc, hopefully I made covered some useful information. And I DID have a red beret…
You maynot have understood what I was saying about business apps. I did say there were successful companies like SugarCRM and Alfresco that had business applications. My point was that industry groups had not yet banded together to create their own open soruce projects to solve a common business problem. I have the belief that there will be a huge growth in this area. The example I used was a group of 10 banks creating an open souce project to solve a commmon problem that today they might each have to create on their own – thus reducing the amount of development expense by a large factor. Instead of VENDORS staffing the open soruce projects, IT ORGANIZATIONS sponsor and staff the open soruce projects. My gut says this will be big, but I have not seen big, successful efforts yet…
Marc will be at JBoss World next week. I will be there on Tuesday all day.
The 50 minute segment got cut short on the front end – there were technical difficulties with the streaming video. I was suppossed to end at 8:50, and I did. I also stuck around for about 45 minutes after my session answering questions 1 on 1.
If you have questions for me, you can feel free to contact me thru Raven.
Bob Bickel
I’m only charging $10 per email as Bob’s gatekeeper!
Raven….having known Bob Bickel for many years….I’d suggest charging $5. Bob drives a hard bargain.
Anyhow, Marc Fleury and I apologize to Sys-Con and the event’s attendees, but as Bob Bickel pointed out, Marc Fleury and I had the Red Hat orientation to participate in, since the acquistion closed this past Friday. Marc has spent many years building up a great company here at JBoss, and the clear choice for both of us was to be with the 200+ JBoss employees on Week 1 of “JBoss – A division of Red Hat”. I hope all of the attendees understand and forgive our absence.
In my opinion, we chose the best proxy possible for this event. Thank you Bob Bickel for representing JBoss at this event and sharing your wisdom and insight to those folks who attended the Sys-Con event!
Shaun Connolly
VP Product Management
JBoss – A division of Red Hat
I just wanted to add for the record as the technical chair for the Enterpise Open Source Conference I thought Bob’s presentation was a great addition, and while Marc may be a very colorful/notorious speaker who we would have loved have. I felt that we lost nothing by having Bob. Bob’s talk was one of the highlights of the event giving a pragmatic and interesting view of open source as it applies to business. And anyone that wears a red beret in front of 400+ people deserves some credit too.
Mark R. Hinkle
Editor in Chief
Enterprise Open Source Magazine
Technical Chair, 2006 Enterprise Open Source Conference
“I’m only charging $10 per email as Bob’s gatekeeper!
”
- so you are not very expencive
apt-potencja.pl
so do i:)