A Colorado Guy, Now in New Jersey!
This is my net place to introduce myself and my family. If you
want a more current view, send me an e-mail for our password protected friends
page.After moving to
Colorado in 1975 to go to the University
of Colorado, I fell in love with Colorado and stayed there for
25 years, until CollabNet pulled me back to where I was born in California.
As techie at heart, I had a Ham Radio License when I was 14, and built the
entire set-up for my radio and transmitter from spare parts I purchased! I
have it on display in my office, but I am scared to start it up and get it
going! I
continued with my techie thoughts by buying an Apple III in 1991. Its was
constructed so badly that to make it work you had to hold it at shoulder height and drop it on
concrete to set the chips into the board! I started surfing BBS's in
1991, and then hosting one, which started my fascination with the online world!
I even used BBS's for communication forums for the political campaigns I was
running in the 80's through 1990.
After starting school again for my MBA, I found the Internet. Several
years ago, I became affiliated with ResNova
Software who make a killer Internet based BBS based on HTML and
HTTP. I became a partner in the company and eventually sold my business to
work there fulltime. I got to spend all
of my time on the Internet and talking about the Internet, <grin!> But alas,
all good things come to a close. Resnova lost steam and money. But
in 1996 Microsoft
bought ResNova and is using its technologies in its products. In fact
if you have used Microsoft's Personal WebServer you have used a product that
still retains a bit of ResNova in it.
I spent a year at Neodata, where my team
built the largest commerce site on the Internet for 1996 (Over 1.1 million
orders in the last seven months of 1996 and 400,000 customer service e-mails
processed) All of those orders came, even though EDS which was buying Neodata,
thought that the Internet would not be useful for transactions!
In 1997 I switched to IBM where my adventures on the Internet have continued with the world's largest computer company.
While at IBM I found myself consulting the Software Group on what their Internet
software servers should look like. With my partners in crime, Jeff Barnett
and Gregg Margosian, we managed to get our idea (code named Hurricane) accepted
by the head of IBM Software, John M. Thompson and staff. Thus began two
crazy years of creating a product line named WebSphere. As part of WebSphere,
I ended up going to the top of IBM Software again to pitch the idea of making a
free (Open Source) Internet Server named Apache
to be the standard WebServer across all IBM product lines - hardware and
software. While I was getting that accepted, I started a mailing list with
a few IBM'ers to discuss Open Source
inside the IBM firewall. Once again I ended up on a team that went
to the IBM CEO's and his direct reports. That team started the idea of
Linux at IBM. And yet another started the idea of Open Sourcing IBM
software. As a result I started by initiating the Jakarta.Apache
open source partnership with Sun, and working on many other Open Source projects
for IBM. After beginning to work on the genesis of an idea that became e2OPEN,
I left IBM to work at Collabnet.
At CollabNet we have shaken the world up by Open Sourcing software for major
companies like Sun and HP,
as well as using code for creating developer communities like Oracle
and Motorola. Over the short two
years we have built a company that can change the methods of creating software
I've also been lending a hand as an advisor to
Jabber.com a promising startup in Colorado
that has created an XML data stream used in a lot of applications like instant
messaging.
Being a good Colorado Kid, I am into skiing, hiking , photography and of
course my online interests. Here is a shot of the view from my old
Colorado home office You might wonder why I ever went into a real
office at at all!
Of course in Half Moon Bay, I tried to run as often as possible on a two mile
run along the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean. That run is pretty cool too,
and the Ocean was a short few blocks away from my house. I have been blessed
to live in such beautiful places.
An opportunity to be the CTO of Jabber, had
me head back to Colorado. But after 90 days I realized, being on the
advisory board and working with the Jabber team full time, were two different
structures. I resigned after 90 days, and decided to get a job with a
large company.
My friend Yen-Ping Shan invited me to interview at
ADP
to work for him and I accepted. I first took over several products and
ideas that had been incubated, but not made into enterprise level products.
We rapidly launched two of these into large numbers of users, iPay (where you
can view your paystatement over the Internet) to over 6.5 million users, and iPQV (viewing mainframe reports as .pdf's over the Internet) to over
49,000
companies. I even launch a W-2 product that allowed over 40 million W-2's to be
imported into TurboTax from Quicken. Then my team launched HomePage, the
first Web based Portal for ADP. And after 15 months of this whirlwind, I
took over several older and more mature ADP products with close to 2 $billion in
sales and millions of lines of code. That s what I spend my days doing is
how to maintain and modernize large code bases of products meant to input
Payroll and HR so that ADP can process these for your company. In the past
five years, PayeXpert has grown to over 50,000 companies and is the largest
Software as a Service application on the Internet today with hundreds of
millions of dollars annual revenue. Over 90,000
companies and 35,000,000 + employees use my teams products.
Recently I decided
to get back into the venture world with by becoming the CIO at
Partsearch Technologies in New York
City. Once I got used t the 2 hour each way commute, I began to have fun
in modernizing the infrastructure and applications at Partsearch. look for
the ability to find spare arts embedded as a search application in retail and
service sites everywhere. Already used by more than 25 major retailers and
many service companies, Partsearch will be using Web Services on our new SOA
platform to extend their business to areas that it never could before.
I hold a degree in Economics from the University of Colorado in Boulder
and dropped from my MBA program at the University
of Colorado in Denver with only a few courses to go so I could work
at an Internet startup, ResNova Software.
Websites that I control, although they are mostly dormant today:
and
here is my official CollabNet photo..
And my
ADP picture is here 
Boulder Colorado A wonderful city that I love to hang out in.
Ever since I went to school there, I can rarely stay away for long!
Vail Colorado The Ultimate skiing area and great page of stuff to
do there!
The Denver Broncos What
would a Denver home page be without a link to the Denver Broncos!
The Colorado Buffalo Football Team
ranks high on destroying my Fall Saturdays as I follow their every move.
Feel free to send any comments to:
james@jamesbarry.com