More Leadership Changes and Mergers


Posted On Feb 28 2007 by

One rarely has time to get bored with the ILS industry these days.

VTLS “Repositions”

VTLS has announced that industry veteran Carl Grant will be stepping down as president and COO. Grant is completing the term of his contract and notified the VTLS Board of Directors that he “plans to move in a new direction in his career.” Vinod Chachra will resume his role as the company’s president and continue as CEO.

Koha Changes Hands

And just in case you thought mergers and acquisitions were only for proprietary software…LibLime has just acquired the Koha Division of New Zealand-based Katipo Communications, Ltd. Katipo was commissioned by Horowhenua Library Trust in 1999 to write the original version of Koha–the first open-source ILS–and has been supporting and promoting Koha since its release in early 2000. LibLime began providing commercial support for Koha in 2005. Chris Comack, the software’s original author, will be joining LibLime.

Now, I have to admit that I am not entirely sure what it means for one open-source support company to acquire another. One thing that LibLime is touting is that the deal does not mean changing software. The free+support model certainly raises some interesting questions about the library software market. Will Koha go head-to-head with the other open-source ILS–Evergreen from Georgia PINES? Will LibLime go head-to-head with Equinox Software, which supports Evergreen? What, if anything, will traditional library vendors do?

And what will Carl Grant be doing? Well, there’s at least one ILS president job open right now. He’s contributed so much to the vendor and library landscape that it’s hard to imagine him not being a part of it. I have told him this myself, so I don’t think he would mind my repeating it here: It would be really cool if some library school snatched him up as an adjunct so students could learn a little something about the practice of dealing with vendors, library automation…you know, real-world stuff.

 

[This post originally appeared as part of American Libraries’ Hectic Pace Blog and is archived here.]

Last Updated on: January 19th, 2024 at 12:22 am, by Andrew K. Pace


Written by Andrew K. Pace


4 responses to “More Leadership Changes and Mergers

  1. Well Koha hasn’t changed hands at all. What it means is that I, and some others who worked at Katipo communications now work for Liblime. Its like saying Linux changes hands, whenever Linus Torvalds changes who is paying him 🙂
    Koha isn’t owned by Liblime anymore than it was owned by Katipo. Thats the beauty of GPL’d software.

    And Koha is for small to large libraries, Evergreen is for large to huge libraries, different audiences entirely, so I dont see direct competition anytime soon. Of course there are lots of other open source ILS’s too.

  2. Thanks for the clarification, Chris! I figured someone would chime in on that one.

  3. Indeed, one is hardly bored at all. However, and meaning no disrespect, is it a given that we want our young’uns to “learn” about the ILS world the way vendors would have us see it?

  4. That assumes that “our young’uns” learn about the ILS world at all. Admittedly, my school still had the word “library” attached to it when I got my MLS.

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