All in the family

January 29th, 2008 javier

News hit today that Covalent Technologies (or what I commonly refer to as Covalent 2.0) was acquired by SpringSource. This is an incredibly interesting piece of news since as most of you might have heard, Hyperic’s founding team met while working at the original Covalent (1.0). We also developed the first version of the HQ technology (then called Covalent Application Manager) back in 2002.

From both a personal as well as a business perspective, this deal makes a lot of sense. On the personal front, Mark, Ryan, Charlie, and company took the good part of Covalent 1.0’s brand and Apache focus and built a good business out of it (one which also happens to be a long standing Hyperic partner for its Apache/Tomcat subscription). I am extremely pumped to see these guys continue to succeed by joining up with the folks at SpringSource. On a business front, this gives SpringSource even more credibility than it currently enjoys within the Apache community. Covalent (1.0 & 2.0) invested a lot of money, time, and effort in supporting the ASF and its products while it figured out how to make a business. SpringSource can now leverage that in combination with a new approach to building enterprise applications based on Spring, Tomcat, and a number of other Apache technologies which Covalent has been delivering support for.

Covalent’s original business plan (the 1.0 days) laid the foundation for what exists today despite the fact that the business model which powered the original company was ultimately unsuccessful. Back then, we (a number of other very smart and dedicated people worked their tails off to make it work) tried applying old rules to a fundamentally new game all while enduring a harsh economic climate. The idea that money could be made while supporting and yes, commercializing Apache has always made sense to a lot of people. The mechanism employed was the real trick. Covalent 1.0 was a products business around a pervasive product that was at the end of the day different than the one we sold. Two things that come to mind from those days are customers saying “hey, can you support my Apache? Here’s the apxs” and me thinking “man, how hard can it be to support something that doesn’t randomly break?”. In the end, the choice to support any Apache (including yours), the emphasis on Tomcat, and a ton of hard work led Covalent 2.0 to success. It’s good to see them pair up with SpringSource to truly maximize the potential.

From our end, its a great sign that our former colleagues are now paired up with our new partners with the promise of great results. We share investors, but at the end of the day are two companies focused on our respective markets. SpringSource will continue to deliver the best way of building enterprise applications on the best open source stack, and Hyperic technology will continue to be the best management solution for that stack.

Entry Filed under: Community, HQ, IT Industry, Javiers Blog, Press