JBoss founder to Sun’s rescue?

Marc Fleury founded and sold JBoss to Red Hat for $300 million in 2006. Since then, according to his blog, the retired Fleury has been keeping himself busy spending time with his kids, DJ gigs, playing PS3, moving to Madrid and enjoying his new Tesla. But that doesn’t seem to be enough. A confidential source said:

Marc wants to get back into the enterprise software market again. After being out of the game for nearly 3 years he feels understandably a little rusty. Marc wants a role where he can make mistakes without too many consequences. Acquiring Sun could be just what the doctor ordered.

Since Fleury has a doctorate in Physics and sometimes likes to be addressed as Doctor Fleury, it’s not clear whether the “doctor” is a literal or figurative reference.

A key question is how Fleury could come up with the billions of dollars required for the acquisition. A second source said:

Marc invested his proceeds from JBoss very wisely. You read that dude’s blog over the past two years? Yeah, but did you understand any of it? I mean credit swaps, tier 1 capital, TARP. WTF? He’s a financial genius. I saw his eTrade day trading account balance when he was in the bathroom last week. He can fund this deal, no question.

A source close to the situation claims that Fleury wants to turn Sun’s hardware business into a loss leader for a new ad-supported business model. Fleury is alleged to have said:

Look, you hear that Sun is making money by including third-party toolbars and other junk with the Sun JVM and OpenOffice.org. I read this and thought to myself, I don’t know much about ad-supported business models, but since Sun is heading in that direction already, let’s go whole hog. I mean, let’s price the hardware at $1 more than our cost, or else those ***** at HP, Dell, and IBM will sic the DOJ on us. We can make money from companies that want to put their software on the near-free Sun hardware. And come on, with cloud computing coming, who’s going to buy hardware in the future anyway? Sun can either fight that uphill battle or reinvent itself as the No. 1 ad-supported systems company on the planet.

Another source e-mailed:

Marc’s kicking around a few promotions that will shift Sun’s open source software sales into another gear. For instance, customers spending over $500k on open source software will be offered a one-hour drive in Marc’s coveted Tesla. Yes, this promotion seems outlandish. But isn’t that Marc? And isn’t Marc exactly what Sun needs now? I mean Sun needs a guy with a big vision and a cool car.

It also appears to me that Sun and its management has a special place in Fleury’s heart. Fleury wrote to Sun’s CEO:

I hate to think that you didn’t buy JBoss because you didn’t like me. I actually like you. You worked for McKinsey! All I got is a Ph.D. in Physics. I had a hard time finding a job when I got out of school at 28….Ironically, the only job I could score was pre-sales phone support with Sun…I was happy as a pig in **** doing that…

When asked about the rumors over e-mail, Marc replied:

MF does not comment on rumors, especially on April 1.

I’ll follow this developing story as more is revealed. Be sure to check out the publish date.

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p.s.: I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.”