Systinet Appoints Sun ONE Architect as CTO

• By Matt Migliore
• 11/16/2001

Anne Thomas Manes, formerly director of market innovation for Sun and a member of the Enterprise Systems Power 100 of information technology leaders, brings 22 years of experience, 12 of which are in the distributed-computing space, to her new role with Systinet. Manes, who helped develop the first implementation of what is now known as the CORBA object bus, says her primary goal going forward will be to strengthen demand among developers for Systinet’s tool set.

“When you’re going after the developers, the quality of technology is key,” says Manes.

As such, Systinet expects to attract developers by offering better tools than some of the space’s most prominent brands like IBM DeveloperWorks, Microsoft Developer Network, and Sun’s Developer Connection. Since Systinet’s developer tools are not free, quality is critical to the company’s success. Systinet’s product suite, which includes a Java-based application server, a tool for building private UDDI registries, and add-ons for Sun’s Forte for Java and Borland’s Jbuilder, requires developers to pay a fee for use each time they deploy a new application.

Manes says Systinet is also aggressively working to ensure its tools work with the Apache Web server, an effort she believes will make Systinet’s tools attractive to developers, as well. But while Systinet will be trying to offer value on top of the developer tools the big names are providing, it is going to have to face direct competition from fellow lower tier vendors like Cape Clear Software.

Cape Clear is one of a number of smaller developer-oriented companies focusing on the Web services space. They, like Systinet, are relying on high-quality tools to earn a living in a business dominated by big-name players.

Founded in 2000, Systinet is headed by CEO and Founder, Roman Stanek, who is best known as the founder of NetBeans, an open-source development platform recently acquired by Sun. Manes says Stanek played a large role in her decision to leave Sun to fill the CTO slot at Systinet. “I’ve know Roman for about four years, and have always had a lot of respect for him,” she says. “When you choose a start-up, you’ve got to choose carefully, but Roman had great success with four other companies.”

Beside NetBeans, Stanek has been able to launch and sell off three distributorships, each in the Czech Republic, for Informix, SilverStream and PowerSoft products. Stanek is looking to Manes to help him lead Systinet down a similar path in the Web services space, as well.

Systinet made its first moves under Manes this week, releasing a SOAP extension for the Borland JBuilder development platform; a SOAP applet for lightweight Java applications; and support for the new JAXM Java API for XML messaging under its application server.