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Xcalia

Went to an event hosted by Libelis (who we buy JDO software from) on Wednesday. Among the announcements:

• They have changed their name to Xcalia, as it it works better in English and they are planning to expand into the US. As the CEO said, it's awfully hard to think of a name which hasn't already been registered as a .com. What he didn't say, but I'm sure didn't escape any French-speaker is that it sounds very close to escalier, staircase. Which I guess is also apt because European companies that try to break into US markets tend to find that their profitability goes steeply up or down, never stays flat.
• They have drastically improved their GUI tools, including adding some useful-looking performance tools, and launched them as a separate product, Navilis. The JDO product is still called LiDO.
• They are repositioning themselves slightly as an Enterprise Information Access company rather than a simple JDO vendor. I suspect this means the part of their business they want to develop most is the consultancy/integration side, which seems smart.

They had four customers give talks on how they've used LiDO, and three of the four were using it to access legacy systems. These talks were all in French, which was fine except for the Parisian whose accent lost me now and then.

Afterwards I got to talk to many Xcalia employees, including a developer turned pre-sales tech and the CTO, as well as some of the other guests including a global recruitment guy and venture capital fund manager who asked a lot of questions about what I thought of Java and .net. I was reassured that Xcalia is going to continue to be around regardless of what happens to JDO, but found out very little about what's going on with EJB 3.0. However, since the CTO is joining the EJB3 expert group hopefully we will have a channel to find out about this soon.

: 08 Oct 2004 15:40 |  Tags: Trip Reports |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem