Unicon Chief Software Architect John Lewis Named to Sakai Product Council
Council Focus to Ensure Product Quality and Cohesiveness for Teaching, Research, and Collaboration Needs
Phoenix, AZ - June 09, 2009 —Unicon, Inc., a leading provider of software consulting services and open source solutions for the education market, today announced that its Chief Software Architect John Lewis has been named to the new formed Sakai Product Council by a special committee within the Sakai Foundation Board. The Sakai Product Council is comprised of nine members and will act on behalf of the entire Sakai community to ensure the exceptional quality and cohesiveness of Sakai product releases in their support of varied teaching, research, and collaboration needs. John Lewis is a 17 year veteran of the software engineering industry, is active in several higher education open source communities, including uPortal and Sakai, and serves on the Board of Directors of Jasig. Unicon is a Sakai Commercial Affiliate and has provided over 175 colleges and universities with software consulting, support, and related services for their online campus deployments.
"I am excited at the opportunity to further serve the Sakai community as part of the Product Council," said Mr. Lewis. "Sakai is moving into a new era of long-term sustainability as a project. This group, along with other key changes taking place in the Sakai Foundation, are positioning Sakai for continued growth and success."
John A. Lewis Bio
As Chief Software Architect, John is primarily responsible for developing the technology strategy of Unicon's solutions portfolio for higher education. John is a 17 year veteran of the software engineering industry with expertise in large-scale enterprise architectures, open source technology, and agile software development methods. His team helps seamlessly integrate the latest technologies into Unicon’s world class solutions and services for higher education. John is a regular speaker at national and international conferences on enterprise open source technologies in higher education. John has been a long-time advocate and contributor in the open source software community. He is the lead developer of Spring Portlet MVC, the JSR 168 Java Portlet development framework that is part of the wildly popular Spring Framework project. He is also active in several higher education open source communities, including uPortal and Sakai.
About Sakai
The Sakai software is a community source effort to develop a platform for innovation in collaboration, teaching and learning, and research support software. The Sakai Project’s primary goal is to deliver the Sakai application framework and associated course management software (CMS) tools and components that are designed to work together. These components are for course development, delivery, management, and, as an augmentation of the original CMS model, they also support classroom and research collaboration. The software is being designed to be competitive with the best CMSs available. For more information visit: www.sakaiproject.org.
