Mark Rekveld, Founder & CEO, Marvelution

The most recent couple of years have denoted a transitioning for open source software, as the mentality of proprietary software vendors has shifted, significant IPOs and acquisitions have highlighted business potential, and developer networks have kept on extending well beyond traditional tech centers.

Following the acquisitions of Red Hat and GitHub, IPOs of Elastic, Cloudera, and MongoDB, and large funding rounds of a lot more open source-based companies, that has changed unequivocally. In the not-so-distant past, it was profoundly antagonistic to accept that a multi-billion dollar organization could be built with open source at its core. One such firm that was started by Mark Rekveld, as a project based on observations as a hobby, Marvelution is now a full-fledged development company providing integrated support on Jera Cloud. 

 How did it all start?

In 2007, Mark began his career with a few significant names in the business like Oracle, BEA, IBM, SAP, and Siebel. While working in these firms, he soon understood that open source is a  gem around then for organizations that was not utilized in the projects, even though it was far better and quicker than the favored big software houses like Oracle, IBM, and WebLogic.

Mark spotted the opportunity to create an offering that connects 'Jera with Jenkins,' on the notion that Jera will collect errors, and configure how to update results on Jenkins (earlier known as Hudson) server in a Jera App. Mark got going off working hours to make open-source arrangements which drove him in executing an alternate style of integration among Jenkin and Jera. This resulted in a number of projects over the years, out of which the most successful was the Jera Hudson Plugin. A plugin for Atlassian Jera that integrated Hudson using a different integration mechanism. This open-source umbrella project showed unexpected success with over 3000 active installs worldwide in no time.

From 2007 till 2015 all the projects of Marvelution were released as open-source and free to use while being supported in the off hours when Mark was not working as a consultant. Finally, in 2015, he formally established Marvelution, the company. Since then the software projects are still open source, still free, but now also include paid and hosted versions.

In conversation with InnerReview Magazine, Mark expresses, "Even though they had a lot to offer. The best thing was support. The big names took a long time to respond to support questions, but with open source, it was usually within a couple of hours. The beauty of this was that 9 out of 10 times it was another user of the open-source software that was giving the answers to support questions. This opened my eyes and I started looking more into open-source software and started playing around with them outside of work to see how I could use them, and learn from them."

Open Honest & Clear

As a part of its achievements & recognitions, Marvelution has been featured in many popular business magazines like Global Business Leaders MAG, The Enterprise World, The Silicon, Corporate Vision, to name a few. Jenkins integration for Jera is also a recommended Atlassian DevOp app.

Talking about his key differentiators as compared to competitors, He says, " I'm not sure as I don't keep a close eye on the competition. But if I had to guess it would be the different take on the integration of Jenkins and Jera, the main focus of Marvelution, in combination with the open, honest, no bs working with customers.

Piece of Advice for Budding Entrepreneurs

Mark advises young entrepreneurs, "Be open, honest, and clean with customers, and just because one customer pays more than another doesn't mean they deserve more or less attention. Other than that, run your own race. The success of one is by no means guaranteed success for you if you copy their work. Running your own race will give you focus that will bring you your success"

The plan is to have fun

Whenever the CEO is asked about any of his plans, he always replies simply that he wants to have fun. Mark says, “Marvelution does not have an agenda and the only policy in play at the moment is that work should be fun. I don’t have strict future business plans other than to keep having fun. Fun coding solutions to new challenges, fun supporting customers. There are no plans to expand in terms of workforce as I can keep up with development and support workloads, but plans can change, and if needed I already have a group of people around me that can help in expanding the workforce.”

Furthermore, he adds, "The only thing I know now is that the future should provide fun in developing new features and assisting customers. Other than that, there are no goals to be the biggest by any arbitrary metric."