JBoss Signals Growth with New CFO

JBoss signaled a swing into a new strategic direction for growth Monday with the announcement of a new chief financial officer, Cary Smith. Smith was named to fill the slot that had been held down by Stephen Hobbs, who was pulling double duty as CFO and controller for the company.

The news comes on the heels of a $10 million dollar round of financing led by Matrix Partners that closed at the end of February. The JBoss financing is one among a flurry of recent open source financings that venture investors have been bestowing on open source players in recent months.

Smith is a 15-year industry veteran who most recently served as the chief accounting officer for Internet Service Provider Earthlink . Smith had before that been the vice president and corporate controller at MindSpring Enterprises, which was acquired by Earthlink.

JBoss is the professional offshoot of the JBoss open source project, which is best known for its popular J2EE Application Server. The JBoss Application Server competes for the same business as BEA’s WebLogic and IBM’s WebSphere.

“From the onset, JBoss has been extremely committed to maintaining profitability, fiscal discipline and manageable growth. With the success of our recent bid for venture financing, we are more focused than ever on a long-term financial strategy,” said Marc Fleury, CEO of JBoss, in a statement.

“Cary’s impressive financial management career spans all areas important to the financial health of any company, and we look to him to play a key role as JBoss continues to expand as a Professional Open Source company.”

JBoss recently struck an agreement with open source database provider MySQL to bundle the two products together. The two companies have similar business strategies in that both have two streams, one for the open source project and the other for professional services and enterprise deployment.

In an effort to stem the tide towards JBoss, BEA, recently unveiled a new tool to woo Java Application developers to its platform. BEA’s products compete with
JBoss.

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to our newsletter.

Subscribe to Daily Tech Insider for top news, trends & analysis

News Around the Web