Jelastic, the cloud hosting platform for Java and PHP applications recently announced two new additions to their team. James Gosling, creator of the Java language, and Bruno Souza, Brazilian Java developer and Java Champion, will be joining Jelastic as an independent director and advisor, respectively. We interviewed Jelastic CEO, Ruslan Synytsky, to hear his thoughts about the new positions and how they will provide value to Jelastic.
InfoQ: Give us some background about the Jelastic advisory board. How long has it been around for, and how has it evolved?
Ruslan Synytsky: The advisory board has been around since the beginning and our first adviser was Soeren von Varchmin. After Soeren came on board, we realized that we needed more expertise and started to look for experts to cover different and very specific areas that needed attention. For us, it's not about the marketing value of having these well known "star" advisers. It's about how they can help to improve Jelastic and solve complex issues.
InfoQ: How did you know James and Bruno before they joined Jelastic?
RS - I met with James via our investors and it took some time to find a mutually convenient time for a meeting. We met at Java Sushi in San Francisco where James provided feedback, his industry vision and thoughts on Java's future development and the current state. He also shared his opinion on IT development, Java in the future and cloud - Java in the cloud is very significant for us.
We continued to converse via email and met again at JavaOne 2014 where James shared more valuable advice on marketing and business development. We then came to a formal agreement where he would join us as an independent director.
In May 2014, Jelastic reached out via email to Bruno to thank him for mentioning Jelastic in various presentations and to notify him of our new partners in Brazil. We had many discussions about getting the Java community in Brazil more aware of Jelastic and also asked Bruno to take a closer look at our platform and provide some feedback.
I met him in Brazil at RubyConf this year and we had several long conversations. We figured out that we fit very well to each other because he understands Jelastic and loves technology and he has ideas how to help Jelastic. After that, we had a meeting at JavaOne and he suggested we should participate in the JCP. He also provides us with good introductions to Java User Groups in various countries. Now, he helps us to build relations in the Java community.
InfoQ: What do James and Bruno each bring to the Jelastic Advisory Board
RS: James Gosling will bring expertise and advice regarding Java in the cloud, marketing and business strategies. He has very strong expertise in business development and excellent advice on important board meeting topics. James will bring great influence to the board. As a technology guy, it's a positive for me to have someone on the board who understands the technology to help with convincing and compelling investors.
Bruno will provide an in-depth analysis on our platform, suggest ways we can improve, obvious challenges we need to address and continue to engage the Java community in his unique and friendly way.
InfoQ: Can you discuss the evolution of the PaaS and IaaS space, Jelastic’s involvement and future plans?
RS: People don't care about acronyms, they need a solution for their complex issues. We believe a hybrid solution covers most cases. Simplification and flexibility are key points. I believe that enterprises will move faster to the PaaS space next year. The rate of adoption is getting faster. Its accelerating.
Eventually, PaaS will be everywhere and all cloud vendors will provide PaaS. It will become a mandatory requirement for development of IT projects because it saves a lot of time. In the past people used Assembler, C, then Java, PHP and other sets of languages to speed up their development time. PaaS is the next level of evolution that solves the same issue - productivity of development, getting results faster and cheaper.
PaaS will be a commodity, everywhere in IT.
InfoQ also spoke with James Gosling and Bruno Souza about their recent new roles.
InfoQ: Why is Jelastic a good fit for you?
James Gosling: I’ve been a big fan of JElastic for years. I love the way they make clouds easy: just write your app and skip all the mess of configuring a pile of servers. Since I’ve gone from being on the side of those implementing clouds to being a user of clouds, I hope to help them do an even better job.
Bruno Souza: As a Java developer it's easy to love the simplicity of deploying applications in a truly Java-based, standards compliant environment, that is easy to customize. Jelastic provides a JVM in the cloud, scalable and ready to use! But I specially love that fact that Jelastic brings a new business model to the cloud, one that promotes local companies, and counter the high centralization of cloud providers. Jelastic promotes the power of Java, by building on top of Java's run anywhere promise, and extending this to allow many providers to compete in this market. Working with JUGs around the world, I hope to help Jelastic deliver on their vision of getting the cloud everywhere, in the hands of developers.