JBoss founder to Sun's rescue?
Amid speculation of Sun's imminent acquisition, several sources are confirming that Marc Fleury is considering an offer for his ex-employer
Follow @SavioRodriguesMarc Fleury founded and sold JBoss to Red Hat for $300 million in 2006. Since then, according to his blog, the retired Fleury has been keeping himself busy spending time with his kids, DJ gigs, playing PS3, moving to Madrid and enjoying his new Tesla. But that doesn't seem to be enough. A confidential source said:
Marc wants to get back into the enterprise software market again. After being out of the game for nearly 3 years he feels understandably a little rusty. Marc wants a role where he can make mistakes without too many consequences. Acquiring Sun could be just what the doctor ordered.
Since Fleury has a doctorate in Physics and sometimes likes to be addressed as Doctor Fleury, it's not clear whether the "doctor" is a literal or figurative reference.
A key question is how Fleury could come up with the billions of dollars required for the acquisition. A second source said:
Marc invested his proceeds from JBoss very wisely. You read that dude's blog over the past two years? Yeah, but did you understand any of it? I mean credit swaps, tier 1 capital, TARP. WTF? He's a financial genius. I saw his eTrade day trading account balance when he was in the bathroom last week. He can fund this deal, no question.
A source close to the situation claims that Fleury wants to turn Sun's hardware business into a loss leader for a new ad-supported business model. Fleury is alleged to have said:
Look, you hear that Sun is making money by including third-party toolbars and other junk with the Sun JVM and OpenOffice.org. I read this and thought to myself, I don't know much about ad-supported business models, but since Sun is heading in that direction already, let's go whole hog. I mean, let's price the hardware at $1 more than our cost, or else those ***** at HP, Dell, and IBM will sic the DOJ on us. We can make money from companies that want to put their software on the near-free Sun hardware. And come on, with cloud computing coming, who's going to buy hardware in the future anyway? Sun can either fight that uphill battle or reinvent itself as the No. 1 ad-supported systems company on the planet.
Another source e-mailed:
