Standing in the Field @ Valley Forge

Standing in the Field

Notes from SJS Application Server Field Engineering

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Friday May 20, 2005
White Hats

Roughly four years ago, Scott McNealy addressed a group of iPlanet employees, including myself. This was in the middle of the dot com boom, and there were still a lot of questions about what direction the internet was going to take. At the end of his speech, Scott commented that there were a lot of companies trying to make the web proprietary and trying to lock customers into proprietary solutions. He said that Sun was in a battle to keep the network open and to develop solutions that favored customers and not vendors. The last part I remember exactly. He said, "isn't it nice to be working for the company wearing the white hat."*

That has always been important to me. It has been nice to be working for the company in the white hat. Sun has had its ups and down since then and so has its stock price. I've been re-org'd more times than I care to count. But Sun has never wavered from its commitment to openness, to its customers, and to operating with integrity.

There are lots of companies out there that claim to be open. But most of them are just interested in how they can make money from the open source contributions of others. A lot of companies "talk the talk, but don't walk the walk" when it comes to contributing to the commons. Executive management at Sun may not have always been effective at "talking the talk", but Sun has always "walked the walk" about open source and open platforms.

However, the time has come for me to leave Sun.

After working with Java since version 1.1 and J2EE from the very beginning, it's time for me to move up the software stack. I've accepted a position with Fuego, a leader in the exciting market of BPM software (business process management). I see in Fuego the same commitment to customers, to innovation, and to openness. And I believe that BPM software will be the key to making Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) a reality. BPM is the glue that will make everything (people/processes/systems/services) work together.

Anyway, thanks to all of those of you who have read my blog or had me come to your company. You can now find me blogging at BPM Blog. ( RSS feed ) My first couple of posts will be about why I've made this move and why I think that people who are interested in J2EE should be learning about BPM. (I promise I'll be better at keep the blog updated. I have a lot of plane rides ahead of me: lots of time to be writing blog posts. :-) )

Thanks again for reading and I hope to see you at BPM Blog. (If you have trouble connecting today, the DNS may not have propogated to you yet. Try again tomorrow.)

David

*For those non-US readers not familiar with the expression "white hat", old western movies stereotypically had the good characters wearing white cowboy hats and the villains wearing black hats.

(2005-05-20 10:44:57.0) Permalink Comments [1]