“Brett Pinegar, Akopia president and CEO, now general
manager of Red Hat’s newly formed e-business solutions division,
talks about Red Hat’s acquisition and plans to create an open
source e-commerce powerhouse around Akopia.”
“Enterprise Linux Today: Could you start by
giving us a little background on the Red Hat deal?
Brett Pinegar: …we’re putting together a
separate division, or group, to focus very specifically on
e-business solutions. …long term we offer the option of a managed
hosted solution. So for customers who are in need of critical
levels of reliability and uptime, and need staff to be monitoring
the solution 24×7, we can provide that solution for them.”
“ELT: How did the deal with Red Hat come
together?
Pinegar: Akopia and Red Hat have been partners
for a number of months… from that close working relationship it
became evident that a closer, acquisitive relationship would be
beneficial for us… So it was just sort of a natural
evolution.”
ELT: Do you envision the Interchange product
continuing to be used with other Linux distributions?
Pinegar: Not only other Linux distributions,
but other operating systems as well. Interchange functions in a
variety of Unix and Linux platforms and it will continue to do so,
just as CCVS and Stronghold Apache operate in other environments as
well. So we will continue to offer our solutions in those other
environments, and we will continue to ensure that the product works
very effectively in those environments as well.”