Mindreef Helps SOA Grow Up

Over the last couple of months, we've had the pleasure of working again with Frank Grossman and Jim Moskun, the visionary founders of Mindreef. Jim and Frank also founded NuMega -- our very first client. (I've still got a copy of our very first CHEN check, which was from NuMega.) NuMega was sold years ago to Compuware and Jim and Frank moved on to found Mindreef.

We've enjoyed working with Andrea Kokolis and Jamie Manning from the internal team to launch Mindreef Coral, which debuted yesterday. We believe Mindreef Coral to be the first Web services lifecycle collaboration platform (which is why it's the headline of the press release). We've briefed a bunch of analysts over the last few weeks, and no one has disagreed with us.

With the trend to distributed development teams, many development environments are adding collaboration capabilities. But since services get shared around an organization -- and usually require input from folks in various jobs all around the place -- building a service-oriented architecture requires collaboration on steriods. It also requires a platform that can be used by these folks in different roles -- architects, managers, business analysts, developers, testers and support staff.

Mindreef Coral was built to address these issues. The product fills a market need because Jim, Frank and their team built it the old fashioned way -- they listened to their customers. Mindreef's first product -- SOAPscope (Web services diagnostics) has more than 1000 customers -- giving Mindreef a view into countless real-world SOA petri dishes.

We've been gratified by the coverage so far, which is popping up in eWeek, InfoWorld, Computerworld, ZDNet, (ok I'm tired of pasting links) Network World, ADT Mag, WebServices.org, Computerwire, Mass High Tech, Sys-Con, SOA Pipeline, and the Nashua Telegraph.

This line is perhaps my favorite takeway from this launch. One highly regarded reviewer termed his briefing with Mindreef, "...probably the most interesting hour I've spent all week." (For the record, it was the end of the week.)

It doesn't get much better than that. We tip our hats to the Mindreef team.