johnp's blog

Matt Asay

February 5th, 2010

I’d like to be among the first to congratulate Matt Asay on his appointment as COO at Canonical.  This is a well-deserved and terrific career opportunity for Matt and a reflection of his extensive open source influence, experience and breadth of business management skills.

In his role leading sales and business development for Alfresco in the US, Matt was instrumental to our rapid growth during our first five years.  As part of this, he built a great organization that will carry this momentum forward under the management of Bill Robinson, who took over the role as VP of Americas in March 2009.  In the last year, Matt has focussed on expanding Alfresco’s business development initiatives and strategic partnerships with notable successes in our open source ecosystem partners MySQL, Red Hat, Acquia/Drupal, Canonical, Jaspersoft, Spring and Liferay. In recent months Matt and Luis Sala have worked to launch our cloud strategy with partnerships including RightScale and Amazon.

Whether serving as an Alfresco executive, CNET blogger, OSBC chair, Arsenal supporter, or most importantly, a dedicated family man, Matt attacks every challenge with contagious enthusiasm.

I’ll miss Matt’s unique and insightful contribution, Matt reached out to me when Alfresco started and I knew we had to hire him in the first 30 seconds. He did not disappoint building a solid base for Alfresco and helping guide us in the fast flowing river that is the open source world. I will also miss his devotion to classic English literature and I forgive his constant commentary on Arsenal’s league and championship performances!

With Canonical he will still have a compelling reason to visit the UK (not just Arsenal games) and I’m looking forward to his continuing support as an open source colleague over the coming years.

We anticipate that this appointment can only be positive for both Canonical and Alfresco as pioneers in open source with similar philosophies of delivering simple open source solutions to the widest possible audience. It is no surprise that Ubuntu Server Edition is the most popular Linux distribution among the Alfresco community. We see many open source community members using a combination of Alfresco as their content management solution and Ubuntu as their chosen operating system.

I know all within the Alfresco community will be very happy for Matt and want to thank him for his exceptional contribution to our success.

Good luck Matt!

Entry Filed under: Alfresco