Hello everybody. Here we are at EclipseCon in lovely Santa Clara and we've got another guest with ourselves. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. Hi, my name is Wayne Parrott. I'm with Genua Tech. I'm the Vice President of Product Development. You're very involved in the Eclipse world, building your product portfolio on top of it essentially. But for folks who don't know you that well, can you give us a quick introduction of what Genua Tech does? We're an Eclipse technology company. We've been involved in the Eclipse movement since it was first open source. So we've been developing products actively for almost seven years now. On top of Eclipse, we service our Eclipse developer tools and Eclipse plug-in management and distribution. I remember coming across you way back when, you know, my Eclipse was the first thing that you had. And by that I don't mean my Eclipse. It's actually called my Eclipse. And so, I mean, that was sort of like if I remember the first product that you guys had. And it seems like a lot of the portfolio that you have is sort of built upon that same basic idea of packaging up a bunch of Eclipse stuff and adding in some of your own stuff. And having like a pretty, actually a pretty affordable IDE that people, that developers can buy. Exactly, yeah. The first product is my Eclipse Enterprise Workbench. We now have three levels of that. We first rolled out with a real simple entry level, sold it at $30 level. And then we've now got a pro level version, which builds beyond kind of the traditional Java EE developer tools and technologies. And then we added, this last year, we added what we call the blue edition of my Eclipse. And that is for, targeted specifically for WebSphere and IBM Rational developers. They're looking for alternative development tools. In addition to the my Eclipse developer tools, we branched out this last year into the area of plug-in management and distribution. Or really, you can think of it as Eclipse product management distribution, which has not been a well-served community. But with the advent of the RCP platform, we're seeing a lot of business type of applications and desktop applications, which are built on top of the same technology, plug-ins and all. And we have a product called Pulse. And Pulse is geared towards servicing both, helping developers build their own tool stacks,
2:05but also in addition to that, manage enterprise and global level distribution of RCP apps. In addition to people using Pulse to sort of, like you were saying, I'm kind of repeating what you're saying, but to manage their own development tool set, if you will, there's people who have built things on top of Eclipse RCP. And they can use Pulse as sort of like a configuration mechanism, or they are using Pulse. Yeah, absolutely. We've got some very large distributions already. One version of our Pulse product is a customizable. It's called Pulse private label, which means it can completely be reskinned. It's a, you know, a customer hosted type solution. And we've got a couple of distributions that are out there right now. One's managing over 200,000 install sites of a particular customer service application. One of the interesting things about Pulse is the sort of, I don't know, sort of the social aspect around it. You know, there's sort of reviews and people can write things up like that. And I wonder how that's been going for it. It's been coming along pretty well. Really, our biggest uptake has been on the enterprise level. Yeah. So there's not a lot of social aspects around that. But also, the entry level points for Pulse are there's a community edition that allows you to do individual, kind of put together your own tool stack and be able to access it from anywhere. It's a hosted solution. And that's free. And then in addition, we have what's called a team edition for Pulse. Right. And that's for small or any size developer team. But it's really geared around putting together, you know, your tool stack, being able to share it with your team, do updates and that kind of thing. And then also we're building in more social networking type of capabilities so that, you know, as people talk about, talk back and forth, especially in virtual team environments, that kind of interaction and, you know, be able to have everybody kind of share a context is something that Pulse is expanding out into. Yeah. I remember when I first heard about that part, it made me remember back when Emacs was sort of like the IDE to liberally use that term of choice.
4:11You know, everyone was into sharing their .emacs files to sort of like show off the configuration that they had and all their stuff like that. You were old. Speaking of enterprise, one of the other things you mentioned was the blue edition that you have that services sort of the web sphere world. That's actually been something that we've, for quite a few years, we've provided an application server connector in our MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench tooling for web sphere, for basically allowing J2E developers to be able to interact, deploy and test and debug against web sphere. But it wasn't very good because web sphere is kind of a, it's a very different animal with, you know, relative to most of the other applications, J2E application servers that are out there. We had a number of customers that were complaining about looking at RAD, well, IBM's rational tooling, and asking us, like, hey, we love everything you've got. Because our feature sets were, the features that we supported were actually much richer than what RAD was providing. And they were buying MyEclipse and RAD in addition. They're like, can you help us just improve your connector? Right. They wanted to consolidate the new tool. Right. So they were like, just give us a better web sphere integration story. In addition to that, when IBM basically discontinued support for the WSAD 5.1, which is the predecessor for rational application developer, that left a number of really big companies just hanging. And so they immediately called us and said, we're looking for an alternative right now. How can you help us? And then also help us with supporting our old 5.1 projects. And then also give us a pathway to be able to upgrade and adopt some of the newer J2E technology. So right out of the box, you know, we have a lot of interest from a lot of corporate customers that have a long legacy support issue with their WSAD projects. So, and we've been supporting web sphere 5.1, you know, going way back, you know, that app server and the tool stack, you know, in our traditional tool.
6:14And that influenced us to actually step back and look at what are the things we can do for a developer that's specifically focused on supporting, has to develop and deploy to web sphere 5.1, 6.1, 7. You know, that whole lineage of versions of web sphere. Sort of multi-web sphere deployment. Right. And we've supported them and we know them pretty, we know them actually very well. So we said, but let's just push the MyEclipse tool set a little bit further out and focus specifically on web sphere developers. And so that led us to release Blue last year and then we've continued to support. Two weeks ago we rolled out MyEclipse 7.1 which allows MyEclipse users that have a, basically allows MyEclipse to be able to operate on top of RAD projects. Right, right. So right now there's no, so they're not. So MyEclipse is compatible with the project that RAD, the stuff that RAD puts out. Right, so you just fire up MyEclipse, point it at your RAD project, suck it in, boom, away you go. So you're able to run on top of the same project structure, you know, and you know, don't have to upgrade or do anything like that with your projects. What's the uptake of the Blue stuff then? It's been very good, especially with the, you know, the economy's driving, some customers are evaluating. Others are looking at they want to be able to move quicker on certain technologies and RAD hasn't moved at the velocity that they, you know, of their interest. And so we have a very rapid, you know, delivery cycle. So we usually release every two months, have upgrades constantly. And we take a lot of customer feedback and try to turn that back into our product iterations as we move forward. And you guys have also been doing some mobile stuff, if I remember correctly, right? Yes, absolutely. I'm leading a new mobile web initiative. And we've got two aspects of that. One is there's an open source component and then a commercial component. Our commercial component is known as, excuse me, it's known as the mobile web studio. Our focus there is on, we've already, we've been developing web developer tools for a number of years.
8:18And we've had a number of customers that have come to us specifically as the iPhone has gained more and more popularity. Our customers have asked and said, hey, what we want to do is we want to be able to target some of our web content or we want to be able to have some of our services in a play on the iPhone. Right. The, you know, the party line has been that, oh, well, in order to have a really good iPhone experience, you're going to have to write native. It's going to require Objective-C. You're going to have to go through App Store to deployment. And they just, like, it's a complete turn off. It's kind of like, oh, I go through this whole lock-in thing. So the question we've gotten is, like, I've got all these web developers. You know, what would you do, GenuaTech, you know, if you were trying to address this? So we sat down and we looked at, over the last year we've been following the advances in, you know, the traditional HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and all of them have moved. There have been key advances that have made it very attractive to build some really compelling UIs on top of that technology base. Enterprise customers that are interested in targeting for the iPhone are, they want an iPhone-type look and feel or an iPhone theme in their web applications. So it doesn't have to be perfect, but get it close. So what we've been demonstrating here at EclipseCon is an early release version that we have of Mobile Web Studio that demonstrates a picture-perfect type of what-you-see-what-you-get type of environment. And it's all in web technologies. It's all built on top of, right, it's built on top of a custom version of WebKit for SWT. And we're going to be open sourcing that through our affiliation or leadership on a project called Blinky, which was just approved. The story behind Blinky, I always have to tell it, when we wrote the original proposal for a mobile web developer tool stack through Eclipse, when I wrote that, it was originally called Firefly. And due to some naming conflict issues, we had to rename it. And as a result, we thought, well, everybody was telling us, we love the Firefly theme.
10:21Sorry, you have to change the name. So Blinky, spelled with a B-L-I-N-K-I, is the Jamaican English word for Firefly. Firefly. So we just stuck with, it's just a Blinky bug. It's also one of Matt Groenig's, like, rabbit characters, if I remember. Like, remember before The Simpsons, he had a bunch of characters that were rabbits? And I think Blinky was one of them. Yeah, other people have asked us if it's related to the Pac-Man. Oh, yeah. I think it was the little ghost guy or something. Yeah, and I think the three-eyed fish in The Simpsons was named Blinky, right? Blinky. It's interesting because there is, I see a lot of, I guess you would call them web developers who, they're fine doing web applications and everything, but there's, they're more, they're slightly interested in other options that they have to use their web development techniques to get to other platforms, whether that's like desktop RIAs or in the mobile devices and things like that. And like you're saying, I mean, it is, I mean, it's the cliche to say it, but it is remarkable how much the iPhone motivates people to just develop for it. Oh, absolutely. It's really the new, set a new benchmark and establish the mindshare about what a smartphone really is and what it should look like, you know, going forward. So it set a new baseline to, you've got to clear that bar, you know, going forward to be cool. And so does Blinky address other platforms, like other mobile platforms? It will. It will. Actually, Blinky, the open source component of that is really meant to build a community of not just, well, okay, Apple's not a player in the Eclipse ecosystem. Right. I mean, they've opted out of that. What we're doing is part of, by supporting the iPhone with our efforts, is it establishes, everybody can identify with it very quickly. You know, it sells itself is probably the best way to describe it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's what the market is demanding at the moment. Absolutely. Yeah. But the other carriers, I mean, the other handsets, RIM, you know, the Nokia's, Motorola's,
12:22others are also very interested. And, again, Blinky is initially focused on what we're contributing to the project is web kit-based technology for handsets that support web kit, the newer versions of web kit. We're concentrating on that. So it's 2009. Going forward is really kind of where our initial interest is. And so we've talked to RIM. They're already very interested in increasing their activity here at Eclipse. So definitely want to be working with them more, supporting some of the storms and their product line going forward as well. While the iPhone's a competitor for RIM and all these other people, it's also nice to take advantage of renewed interest in developing for the mobile platform. Oh, yeah. That the mobile web based on the newer -- we call it JCH, JavaScript, CSS3, HTML. Oh, right, right. The JCH technology stack, the newer version, 2009 version, is really compelling in what you can develop. And some of the examples -- I mean, some of the demos and stuff we were showing here, it was a showstopper. Everybody that walked by our booth, they were like, "I've got to see that." Because they could not believe that it was basically a web application running because it was so themed out in a very almost pixel perfect level for the iPhone theme. Great. Well, that was a pretty nice update of what GenuaTech's up to. Great. Thanks for taking all this time with us. Well, thank you.