ActiveGrid, which provides an SOA platform built on the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl software infrastructure stack, has appointed Christopher Keene as chairman and CEO.

Founder and former CEO Peter Yared, who is also a former Sun Microsystems executive, will become chief technology officer and focus on the technology side of the business, especially its mission to simplify the development and deployment of rich, interactive Web applications.

"This is a very positive development. I was the one who instigated the search and found Chris, who is a 24-year veteran of the high-tech industry. I will now focus on our technology and selling as CTO. Scaling up an enterprise software business is not one of my core competencies," Yared told eWEEK.

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Keene comes to ActiveGrid to drive growth as Web 2.0 technologies continue to bring dramatic changes to enterprise computing.

"Leading-edge Web applications like Yahoo and Google are very different to the Web applications built 10 years ago, yet the tools corporate developers are using to build their applications by and large have not changed over the last 10 years," he said.

Read more here about how ActiveGrid delivered new versions of its open-source-based service-oriented application platform.

"I believe that corporate developers are looking for a new generation of tools that radically simplify the development of corporate Web applications," Keene said.

Under Yared's watch, ActiveGrid has helped introduce technologies like lightweight architecture and lightweight integration to the enterprise.

"As a result, organizations have reduced their backlog of integration projects to allow [their] top people to focus on their core business challenges. It is our goal to stay on the leading edge of providing customers with the speed, ease and cost-effectiveness of Enterprise Web 2.0. I am personally excited to focus even more energy on ActiveGrid's customers and technology," Yared said.

Yared was also one of the most vocal critics of Sun's decision not to open-source Java until the company finally agreed to do so last May.

In March 2006, he posted an open letter to then Sun president and chief operating officer, on his Weblog, asking for some clarity on the company's open-source software strategy and questioning why it was fine for Sun to open-source Solaris and StarOffice but not Java.

For his part, Keene founded Persistence Software in 1991, a company that created a new approach for managing data in high-transaction banking and communications systems. The company was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in 1999 and then sold to Progress Software in 2004.

After the sale, Keene spent a year in France as chairman of Reportive Software, a Paris-based maker of business intelligence tools, and as an adjunct professor at INSEAD, a graduate business school.

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