Founder and CTO, CollabNet Brian Behlendorf believes in developers working together. As one of the founders of Apache, he’s seen how teams of geographically disperse developers turned an upstart open source project into the world’s most popular Web server software. Today, as CTO of CollabNet, the hosted collaboration software company he co-founded with O’Reilly and Associates, Behlendorf spearheads new technologies to make distributed application development easier. Along the way, he tackles the unique challenges of this demanding market. “Being a software-as-a-service provider gives us no ability to point the finger at someone else when problems arise, but it also allows us much greater flexibility to solve those same problems,” Behlendorf says. That flexibility means applying the same open source principles and techniques he learned from the Apache project to CollabNet’s hosted software, which allows CollabNet’s customers to apply them in turn to their own businesses.Back to 2005 CTO 25 Award winners Software Development