Active Endpoints is a company that crosses my research and analysis path from multiple directions: open source, business process management (BPM), and standards (see link to IT Investment Research over there on the right somewhere). The company was an early mover in the commercialization of open source development and it's known for its BPM functionality and contributions to the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard.
At the Red Hat Summit in Boston this past June, Active Endpoints brought a lot of that work together when it showed its newest ActiveVOS release for the first time. The VOS stands for visual orchestration system, which if you have seen some heritage BPEL code will be quite appealing to you. Soon Active Endpoints will formally announce the product.
One thing that Active Endpoints is concentrating on is collaborating across IT and business boundaries, which is something we covered when we first included Active Endpoints in our detailed research back in January 2008 that was titled: "Can OSS Integration Server Software Enable EAI/BPM?"
With all these interconnections, we asked Mark Taber, the CEO of Active Endpoints, to join us to tell us more about the multidimensional nature of his company and products. Before joining Active Endpoints in August 2007, Mark served as IBM's Worldwide Business Unit Executive for its SOA Appliance Division, a part of IBM's Application Infrastructure Middleware Group. He had joined IBM through its 2005 acquisition of DataPower. IBM/DataPower provided mission-critical web services infrastructure to more than 300 large enterprise and government customers around the world, helping them to simplify, manage and secure scalable web services communications in heterogeneous environments.
So talking with Mark gives us a great cross section of open source terms and conditions, functionality, big companies, small companies... the whole package. Have a listen,
-- Dennis Byron
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