Tcl Devs Wave Goodbye to Scriptics and Hello to Ajuba
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Where is Ajuba headed?
Ousterhout's challenge, of course, as CEO of a small venture-capitalized software company, was to deliver returns to his investors. He appears to have found the right niche: B2B is one of the few segments where there seem to be enough customers willing to pay for well-engineered software products. And he has the right technology to sell them, as Tcl's superiority in gluing contributes considerable value to businesses looking to automate disparate processes involving heterogeneous resources. Tcl's adaptability is particularly handy in accessing "legacy" data other development languages don't try to support.
Moreover, Ajuba2 (formerly Scriptics Connect) has the right "hook": XML. The Extensible Markup Language remains as hot a buzzword as the industry has, and Tcl is perfect to exploit that interest. In fact, Tcl is currently the single best language for XML development: far more productive than C or C++, more portable and easier to learn than Java, and more mature in its XML capabilities than any other language.
What should Scriptics/Ajuba do with these advantages? The company brought on board respected industry veteran Tom Thomas as President and CEO, as Ousterhout became Chief Technology Officer (CTO). The company has beefed up its marketing of "value proposition" messages that resonate with its prospective business customers. As Thomas was quoted, "Ajuba is devoting its expertise and resources to provide solutions that transform the way industries operate."
The name change is just another aspect of this. "Scriptics" sounded like a place where programmers were in charge, and that's an uncomfortable location for the clients Ajuba is pursuing now. "Ajuba," on the other hand, is supposed to be only a "simple, memorable name," although it has positive glosses in Arabic, where it means "miracle." The point of "Ajuba" is to solidify the company's position as what Thomas calls "a marketplace player."
There's nothing shocking in this. Only a few open-source business strategies have established serious records for profitability, and technology rarely takes the lead in them. Vignette's products critically rely on Tcl, and it might employ more Tcl specialists than any other company, but it's de-emphasizing Tcl in its latest press releases. Tcl stays strictly in the "back office" of AOL Digital City, Travelocity, and other well-known companies that make crucial use of the language.
