SpringSource Names President and Chief Operating Officer

SAN MATEO, Calif.—September 25, 2008 – SpringSource, the company behind Spring and a leading provider of infrastructure software, today announced that Rob Bearden has been appointed president and chief operating officer.  Bearden is a veteran software industry executive and was most notably the former chief operating officer at JBoss before it was acquired by Red Hat.  He will report to SpringSource CEO and co-founder Rod Johnson, the creator of Spring.

“Rob is the perfect person to lead operations at SpringSource,” commented Johnson.  “He brings an impressive and proven track record helping high-growth software companies achieve operational excellence.  His talents will play an integral role as we scale our business.”

“I am thrilled to join SpringSource, a company that is rapidly growing and changing the application infrastructure landscape,” said Bearden.  “I am excited to apply my skills of driving world-class sales and operations to help SpringSource build the next-generation in Java application infrastructure.”
Rob Bearden has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry, with a track record for building strong, global sales organizations and operations.

Before joining SpringSource, Bearden served as an  Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital, a leading venture capital firm based in the Silicon Valley. He was also chief operating officer for OpenSpan, a desktop integration software provider, responsible for global sales, marketing, business development and administration.

Most notably, Bearden previously served as chief operating officer for JBoss, an open source middleware company, where he helped architect and execute the company’s business model and managed its worldwide operations.

Prior to JBoss/Red Hat, Bearden was president of the Americas at i2 Technologies, a supply chain software provider, overseeing operations in the United States, Canada, Latin America and Mexico.  He also served as senior vice president of worldwide sales for Manhattan Associates and spent six years at Oracle Corporation in various executive positions.

About SpringSource
SpringSource created, developed and leads Spring, the de facto standard platform to build, run, and manage enterprise Java applications.  SpringSource is also the leading support provider for Apache Tomcat.   SpringSource delivers an end-to-end platform  that is designed from the ground up for complete portability and scalability for today’s data center and for next-generation virtualized, grid, and cloud deployments. Nearly half of the Global 2000, including many of the world’s largest financial institutions, retailers, manufacturers, healthcare, technology and public sector clients are SpringSource customers. For more information visit:  www.springsource.com.