What’s Ed McVaney Up To Next?

In the IBM i world, no software vendor has found as much as success as JD Edwards. Sold to PeopleSoft for $1.8 billion in 2002 and now a part of Oracle, JD Edwards was the gold standard by which other ERP packages on the platform were measured. Now the principle founder of JD Edwards, Ed McVaney, is involved in another software startup in the Denver, Colorado area called Nextworld. But what does the company do?

That’s a tough question to answer, as the company is still in “stealth mode” ahead of an official launch, ostensibly, at some point in the future. The company was founded just last month, according to the LinkedIn profile of NextWorld founder and CEO Kylee McVaney Lourie, who is Ed McVaney’s daughter and a former development manager at JD Edwards & Co.

Nextworld offers a few clues about what it does on its website. “Our mission is to be the clear software development leader engineering simply brilliant enterprise solutions,” its website reads. “Nextworld is the only complete, enterprise grade, development solution.”

The company continues: “With our extensive experience we know what it takes to develop and deliver solutions that solve the most challenging enterprise problems. Designing and architecting our product specifically for these use cases is what sets our product apart.”

Kylee McVaney Lourie is the CEO of Nextworld.

While the company doesn’t come right out and say what it’s doing, the signs seem to point to some sort of Web-based development and integration product, or possibly a Web-based service. In addition to calling it a “product,” the company also refers to its offering as an “architecture,” and says it will be available via a private or a public cloud.

Some more:

“Nextworld allows solutions to be developed and deployed in a fraction of the time compared to traditional platforms, toolsets and web application frameworks,” the company says. “Our contemporary user interface, responsive web-based client experience, and application interface patterns ensure consistency and simplicity for end users. Patterns for end user interaction are all enabled automatically. This approach reduces the learning curve dramatically.”

While the company is a bit cagey about what exactly it’s up to in the enterprise software space, it’s crystal clear about its commitment to corporate culture and charitable donations. There isn’t a clearly defined offering, but there are extensive write-ups on the company’s two summer interns.

While the details about Nextworld’s product strategy are scarce, it’s clearly stacking its bench with enterprise software talent. Joining Kylee as founders are two former JD Edwards executives Axel Allgeier and Vito Solimene, who are the company’s co-chief software engineers.

As vice president of development at JD Edwards, Allgeier was the principle architect behind JD Edward’s Configurable Network Computing (CNC) architecture, a core underlying building block of the multi-platform EnterpriseOne package that succeeded the RPG-based World product. Allgeier was a vice president at Oracle for nearly 12 years until leaving the software giant in July to join Nextworld.

Solimene has a similar resume as Allgeier: He was a vice president of development at JD Edwards, where he worked on the EnterpriseOne ERP system, which Oracle is now selling on the cloud. He spent nearly 12 years with Oracle, and was vice president of development for Oracle Fusion Applications when he left in July.

McVaney is backing the company as chairman of the board and its principal investor. He is also involved in product design, according to the website. He is not listed as a founder, for whatever that’s worth.

The company recently had two job openings, including one for a front-end engineer and another for a “server-side engineer.” The front-end requires expertise in all the technologies you might expect: HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, among others.

What does Nextworld have cooking in Denver?

The description of the server-side job is more telling. Nextworld is looking for a Java developer who has experience with MongoDB, a document-oriented NoSQL database that stores data in a JSON-like data type, and which is often used as the backend data store for Web and mobile applications that need to scale extensively. Nextworld also wants it server-side developers to be familiar with Linux.

If this all seems a bit opaque and hush-hush, that’s probably by design. It’s not uncommon for software startups to be secretive about what they’re working on. The fact that McVaney is involved immediately piques the attention of the IBM i community, but it remains to be seen if Nextworld has anything to do with the platform. The talk on the site about abstracting away the complexity that plagues enterprise software today seems to hint at wide applicability that could extend to the thousands of current JD Edwards World and EnterpriseOne shops running ERP software on IBM Power hardware, but without specifics, it would only be speculation at this point.

In any event, the company will (probably) eventually fess up to what it’s doing. In the meantime, we’ll just have to wonder.

Nextworld did not respond to IT Jungle‘s emails and phone calls seeking comment before the deadline for this issue of The Four Hundred.