Blog Post

#409 SkyFoundry

brian Thu 4 Dec 2008

Starting this month, Andy and I have resigned from Tridium to start a new company called SkyFoundry. For those of you who know me from Tridium, I'll be consulting back a couple days of week to ensure a smooth transition.

Our new company will be developing middleware for cloud-based applications under the codename of Bespin. The heart of Bespin will be a distributed, documented oriented database similar to Lotus Notes or CouchDB. My current thinking is that the core, single machine database will be open source (but no promises).

Although Bespin will be general purpose software, the applications SkyFoundry will be building with Bespin will be the in "smart device" vertical domains with which the SkyFoundry team has extensive experience. This includes energy management, building automation, industrial automation, residential automation, medical device management, M2M, and asset management.

So what does this mean for Fan? Everything we build for SkyFoundry will be written in Fan - so we'll be putting Fan thru its paces for industrial applications. Up until this point Fan has been a side project for Andy and myself limited to our spare time. Now we'll be focused on enhancing and using Fan full-time. Bespin will be commercially licensed software, but Fan will be the foundation of the Bespin software stack. As we develop the stack, core modules will be rolled into the Fan open source distribution. Since we'll be working from the bottom up, I expect there will be a fairly frenzied pace of new Fan functionality over the next six to twelve months - especially with regard to data modeling, concurrency, distributed computing, and the webapp framework.

cgrinds Thu 4 Dec 2008

Congratulations!! - sounds exciting (surely an understatement). Best of luck in your new venture.

I look forward to seeing what you come up and how Fan grows in the process.

marco Thu 4 Dec 2008

Sounds very cool, good luck! And as for Fan, I think it will benefit from some "dogfooding".

jodastephen Sat 6 Dec 2008

Sounds fun, and could be really important for the future of Fan. Obviously, there is a risk of Fan becoming dominated by one use case, but I see that as a small risk.

brennan Sat 6 Dec 2008

This is a great thing, both for you and for Fan. It will be fun watching Fan develop in the process.

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