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Linuxcare Reincarnated as Levanta
ches_grin writes "BusinessWeek is running a nice profile on Levanta, the former dot-com poster child once known as Linuxcare. From the article: 'It's not that Matt Mosman has an easy job. As Linux continues its march deeper into Corporate America's racks and racks of servers, his small Silicon Valley company, Levanta, is one of many trying to help companies install and manage all those servers--a big, complex problem that's not being solved very well right now. Still, Mosman has one thing going for him: He can't do much worse than his predecessors.'"
I understand, from one of the developers of Linuxcare, that the company was managed poorly, chose silly routes for their services, and were probably a little ahead of their time. Let's hope they make this work.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I've seen Levanta's ads in Linux Journal before. Besides the silly name, it sounds like a pretty interesting premise--remote administration, deployment, and management of servers. I don't know how well it actually works, or how painful the integration with the managed servers is, but it certainly sounds cool.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
"Levanta" means "rise" in Portuguese, in the third person present tense. The infinitive is "levantar".
Levanta (Spanish) = Stand up! (English)
.... "i have no erections" xDDDDD
I'm a spanish spoker (as you can see i don't write englsih well) and i'm wondering why, when english people choose a name for his creations, never check if the name as another significate in other languajes, for example Levanta or, the worst one, "inkulator" than sound in latin as "inculator", that means "ass fucker"
BTW:
"no se me levanta", spanish phrase that means
If LinuxCare left any mark on the world, tt's a poster child of bad-behavior of VCs and the importance of founders keeping in control when negotiating with them.
Someone with a clearer memory than me, and hopefully references, please fill in the details.
On the downloads page on the Levanta Web site, you can find a flash demo that gives a high-level idea of what Levanta's product does. If you enter in your name and some contact info, you can download a white paper that describes the technology. It's pretty cool stuff.
In Argentina we ask "Levanta?" when we want to know if a system/computer/program etc is booting up alright.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
(Dang, I'm so used to Wiki...)
I used to work for LinuxCare, from January 2000 to Sept 2003. I have to say, to was a wild ride.
At the 'LinuxCare' phase, I mostly did contract work to write Linux device drivers for 3rd parties. (Including some absolutely evil stuff like a C++ stub for kernel modules, and a 'look like NT' wrapper for a MPEG encoder kernel module.)
In early 2000, we moved into our 'new' offices (we took up the entire basement of the huge converted warehouse building we were in), and had 'The Worlds Ugliest Mural' done by a local graffiti artist. The entire floor was carpeded with the LinuxCare 'X' logo. Yes, custom logo carpet.
Around 2001, the support business collapsed. The Founders left, except for Art, but we picked up a new CEO, some really smart IBM guys, and started working on what was to be the Levanta project. Originally targeted for IBM z/390 mainframes, it used the z/VM operating system to provide multiple 'on-demand' Linux-on-390 'partitions'. (z/VM is the mainframe equivalent to VMWare, but 20 years old !)
Akmal Khan came on board after Levanta was in full swing, and immediately took a dislike to the the distributed nature of our development group. There was Pittsburgh, doing the primary backend database; Ottawa was doing the web GUI and z/VM interface; Las Vegas handled the web infrastructure; project management in Atlanta; and San Francisco was sales and marketing. Except for SF and Ottawa, most sites telecommuted, so no 'office overhead' for those areas.
It became apparent pretty quickly that Akmal was the micromanaging type. By spring 2003, A.K. had collected his own group of technical people (very good ones, by the way) in SF, diverted all development of 'Levanta-on-Intel' to SF, and started making it pretty clear to the managers that all sites except SF would be going away.
That fall of 2003, the axe arrived for Ottawa, and I walked away from Levanta and the political mess that had developed.
I'm glad to have worked for LinuxCare, and had a ton-of-fun working on Levanta-on-z/390.
Perhaps, because I am a current employee, my perspective is more skewed, but my recollections of the chain of events is different from yours.
Avery Lyford was hired as CEO in September of 2001. He hired Art Olbert from IBM in October and Akmal Khan from SGI in January of 2002.
Art started the original Linuxcare product that was later code-named "Odin" using the people left over from the previous Linuxcare incarnation. The project had some major flaws in both the architecture and the implementation.
AK and another ex-SGI engineer, Nate Stahl, architected a new filesystem which later became MAPFS (and was Open-Sourced) which became the core of what is currently Levanta.
You are right that AK made no bones about disliking the distributed nature of the development group as he is a firm believer in centralized development teams for core work. To his credit, he was open and honest about that (as you have noted) and started to put the necessary skills together in SF. He hired Adam Fineberg, who later replaced him as VP of Engineering, and quickly put together a team to architect and implement what was codenamed the Freya project from scratch.
AK was the principal architect of the Freya project and he himself coded the initial object framework. I would describe him as a "hands-on" technical leader rather than a "micro-manager" as you do. He had little love for the zVM project and was more interested in implementing Levanta on the x86 architecture. The first release of Freya, however, was made on the existing zVM machines in order to not abandon the customers who were already running Odin. Freya was implemented from conception to release in about 7 months - an incredible achievement for code written on a blank sheet of paper. I would also note that since then, no project at Levanta has taken more than 6 months to implement - including the Intrepid hardware appliance. The article did not mention that AK was also the architect for the Intrepid appliance.
I can understand the misgivings that those of you who were on the service end of the axe might feel. Having been there myself in the past, I can sympathize fully. In retrospect, the actions taken were probably the right ones and saved Levanta from ceasing to exist.
Matt Mossman joined in January of 2005 to take the helm of Levanta from AK who had been the acting CEO until then after Avery was axed. Matt brings a history of Funding and merger experience from Oracle and some VC company (I forget the name) where he was a partner. He is exactly the skills we need at Levanta to take us to the next level - if not to IPO, then to a profitable acquisition.