2008 Candidate:
Todd Williams
Vice President - Technology
Nominee for Contributing Member representative
I've have been an active board member of the Eclipse Foundation since early 2003, initially as the representative for Genuitec LLC, (a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation) and more recently as an elected Add-in Provider representative. Additionally, I also serve on the Foundation's Membership Committee and as a member of the Web Tools Project requirements group. Genuitec also leads the Maynstall project and remains involved in the Phoenix project due to Genuitec's founding role in the EPIC Alliance, which built and then donated Eclipse Plug-in Central to the Foundation.
For the past six years I've been constantly evangelizing Eclipse technology and providing thought leadership through numerous consulting opportunities, speaking engagements, member recruitment and magazine articles. My next talk will be at EclipseCon where I'll present "Making Money with Eclipse: A Survivor's Guide" as part of the business track. Much more detail on my Eclipse activities can be found by Googling: Todd Williams Eclipse
| email: | todd.williams at genuitec.com |
Vision
Executive Summary
- Emphasize the requirements of the add-in provider community over other ecosystem participants
- Advocate the commercial interests of add-in providers so Eclipse continues to be a sound investment
- Provide time to adjust to innovations by promoting managed, predictable development cycles
- Protect add-in provider value by emphasizing flexible, extensible frameworks over commercially competitive tools
- Promote the expansion of Eclipse into new and emerging market segments to engender new business opportunities
The success of Eclipse stems from the unique, managed balance between the needs of its three diverse communities: the committers, the add-in providers, and the end users. To gain critical mass, Eclipse began by catering to the needs of the end users. But, now that there are hundreds of products in the add-in ecosystem and an explosion of interest in the rich client platform, the makeup of the Eclipse community is rapidly changing and its needs will continue to change.
As Eclipse evolves, we must continue to delicately adjust our focus to maintain our community synergy. For example, if we were to cater to the desires of the end users too heavily, we could actually remove the incentive to becoming an add-in provider or adopting Eclipse as a platform entirely. Since the initial investment required to build and market a product is so large, commercial product investment would simply be seen as too risky given that our target markets would quickly be commoditized by our own platform.
To prevent this self-commoditization, we must proactively manage the pace, transparency, and predictability of our innovations in order to give our members time to adjust their business models appropriately. However, to remain viable for any of us in the long-term, we must also continue to increase our efforts around creating commercial opportunity for our members while we foster innovation within the projects, both of which will ensure that the word "Eclipse" will always be perceived as a high-quality ingredient brand.
About the Candidate
As a co-founder of Genuitec, I run both the R&D Lab and Consulting Practice for Eclipse Technology. These dual roles provide me with a unique perspective on innovation and its commercial applications with Eclipse technology. Additionally, I have over twenty years of experience in the development of computing infrastructures, large scale distributed software architectures, and the optimization of development processes, techniques, and tools. If interested, a more detailed bio can be found on Genuitec's website here: http://www.genuitec.com/about/leadership.html
Affiliation
Genuitec L.L.C. is a leading provider of innovative Eclipse-based technology products, training, and consulting services. Genuitec's flagship product, MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench, is a full-featured Web/J2EE/AJAX IDE that is used in over 15,000 companies in 150 countries. Genuitec also offers training and expert consulting and development services for the Eclipse SDK and Rich Client Platforms. Genuitec joined the Eclipse Foundation early in 2003 and currently has an employee serving as an elected member of the board of directors where he actively participates in the strategy development and direction of the organization. Genuitec L.L.C. was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Flower Mound, Texas.