Kim Polese
SpikeSource
www.spikesource.com
In 2003, venture capitalist Ray Lane was sitting in his office at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, talking to entrepreneur-in-residence Murugan Pal about enterprise software. Although Lane had spent much of his career in software and services -- including a stint as No. 2 to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison -- the truth was that he was bored by most of the potential business-software deals he was seeing.
But not open source. It was the one area he believed had limitless potential. Now that infrastructure providers like MySQL and JBoss were starting to emerge, applications outfits wouldn't be far behind, Lane mused. Instead of funding a company to develop applications, he decided what was needed was someone to put it all together for companies interested in using open-source programs.
Out of that discussion emerged SpikeSource. Lane and Pal tapped software veteran Kim Polese to run the company. Polese, in turn, has hired managers with strong open-source credentials, including Don Marti, former editor and chief of Linux Journal magazine. For SpikeSoure, which has raised $12 million in venture capital, these are critical appointments. How the open-source community perceives SpikeSource will be important, and people like Marti have the credibility to make sure the startup is seen as a partner, not a newcomer profiting from the innovation of others.
What does SpikeSource do? It scours open-source project boards looking for hot business applications or projects, tests them, and then creates various "stacks" of infrastructure and application programs. Think of it as Lego blocks for corporate tech managers. Downloading the stack is free. SpikeSource makes its money providing service and support.
The logic for such a middleman is obvious. Some of the most exciting pieces of open-source software floating around the Web are from ad hoc collections of programmers working for free. Obviously, there's no company standing behind such projects -- and no outfit to call when something goes wrong. Even among the growing stable of open-source startups, many don't have the capability to do rigorous testing with different combinations of software -- something corporations regularly do before rolling out a new program.