The acquisition of FeedHenry by Red Hat isn’t just one the most exciting tech stories in Ireland in 2014, it is also wonderfully satisfying for me as one of only two people in Product Management.
When I found out that Red Hat was negotiating to buy the company, I couldn’t have been happier. Apart from the almost perfect cultural fit, it was very cool to be joining a company whose products I first used in 1997 with Red Hat Linux 4. By 1999, I told my CTO in Integral Design that PCs running Red Hat Linux would wipe his beloved Sun out. To be fair to him, he agreed. A day hasn’t gone by since ‘97 that I haven’t had Linux running somewhere, whether in skunkworks boxes under my desk; using VMware from ‘99; powering my startup from 2006 onwards; or powering FeedHenry from day 1.
The acquisition itself brought a perfect end to an incredible year for me with FeedHenry as director of Product Management. When I joined in July 2013, we had an excellent developer product but one whose capabilities were often hard to find or use. Some development had begun on a complete re-vamp based on the same core technology but hadn’t kicked into high gear yet.
The most important thing for me and our VP of Product and Services, Javier Perez, was to get a really productive relationship cemented between Product, Engineering, Ops and Sales/Pre-Sales. The other critical thing was to get a big customer, our own PS developers, heavily involved in the direction of the Product. Succeeding with this ensured that we didn’t just achieve product-market fit, but we did it in a very effective way.
We continued to release customer-driven new features and upgrades on the existing platform throughout 2013. As the year closed, we got the upcoming Product to a place where Sales could demo it to customers and we began giving ultra-early access to a select few as we moved into 2014. The feedback was phenomenal. Everyone wanted it now! But we continued to refine and improve and dogfood it until we were happy that we had leapfrogged absolutely everyone in the industry. Finally in April we released FeedHenry 3. Shortly afterwards, the acquisition was underway.
We are now a few weeks post-closing and I realise daily just what a great fit the company and the product is with Red Hat and the middleware suite. In fact, a cross-functional team put together a demo for the Devoxx conference in Antwerp 2 weeks ago which showed a real-world integration of FeedHenry with AeroGear and JBoss Fuse. If we can achieve that so quickly, you’d better watch out for what’s coming in 2015!