Yes it's come time for me to hang up my SpringSource boots and move on to pastures new. As of last Friday I left my good friends at SpringSource with a happy 'Au Revoir' because this week I began my new post as Managing Director of Open Credo.
Inevitably the question anyone is going to ask is 'Why leave!?'. Those perhaps not directly connected to me might even speculate in darker tones things like 'What did they do to make you leave!?', or 'How bad are things!?'. Let me first say that those questions really only indicate just how far from the actual centre of things those individuals are, but that's ok; it's natural to look for something 'juicy' in terms of gossip whenever anyone decides to leave a company such as SpringSource.
The fun thing for me this time around is that the truth could not be further from what the gossip-mongers would perhaps want it to be. SpringSource is a fantastic company, period. Rod, Adrian, Rob, All the Bens, Dave, Greg, Juergen, All the Marks, Keith, Costin... oh and Arjen of course ;) The list goes on and I'm sure I'm missing a few out, but whoever I'm forgetting right now I promise I won't forget in the long run.
So why am I leaving? Simple, because I want to start my own company, focussing on high value, open source consultancy. Couldn't I have done that with SpringSource? Honestly, no because SpringSource do great Spring/Tomcat/Apache subscription, support, training and some top consultancy. SpringSource is becoming very much a product company, and the emphasis on subscription and support makes a lot of sense for that business model, and they're being very successful at it. So, I can truly say without any wry smile 'It was not SpringSource, it was me'.
I wanted something different. Now, the shrewd among my readers will be saying something like 'high value open source consultancy, sounds a bit blurry to me... what's the real proposition for a business?', and that's a great question that I've been mulling over ever since I was originally approached by the rest of the team that have become my company.
Here it is in a nutshell. Open Credo is:
- A company of passionate open source consultants who commit to a number of varied open source projects ...
- ... dedicated tangibly to the success of a relatively small portfolio of clients ...
- ... dedicated to a real ongoing commitment to open source projects ...
- ... working with those clients in a variety of ways, from short to long term ...
- ... offering unbiased, honest arbiter advice ...
- ... to help them navigate the sometimes troubled waters of open source software ...
- ... in order to execute the most productive, high quality, and (no more important than now) cost-effective software development.
So your company may be about to embark on a new product, evaluate some forthcoming technology options, migrate an existing legacy platform, up-skill your team or teams to maximize productivity, completely re-structure your IT strategy, or you might just want the help of real experts to give you the confidence that your business is being best served by your development activities and choice of technologies. If that sounds like you then you might want to give us a call. Myself and my team of expert consultants are here for just those types of challenges.
Our values are also simple and mirror my own, we're here to help your business succeed. Your success is, often with some of our clients, tangibly tied to our own success. This is groundbreaking for a consultancy.
So there you have it, Open Credo in a nutshell. The doors are open for business, I and my team look forward to meeting you in the future.
Cheers,
Russ Miles
Managing Director
OpenCredo
Email: russell DOT miles AT opencredo DOT com
