"The LDAP Guys."

About Symas™

Symas™ Corporation was founded in 1999. The Founders set out to develop industry-leading and proprietary User Management software. The challenge of collecting, organizing, and auditing all the information about who has access to enterprise information technology is daunting. None of the offerings at the time offered practical solutions. The founders of Symas had an approach that offered unique advantages and real hope of tackling the challenge. The proposed approach presented database challenges poorly addressed by Relational Data Base Management Systems (RDBMSs). These challenges were much more directly addressed by the featues of Internet Standard LDAP (LDAPv3) directory data base management software.

In 1999 Symas elected to base its development on the then relatively young Open Source Softare project, OpenLDAP. The project was working to prepare the University of Michigan's Open Source LDAP server software for broader deployment. It needed significant work on portability, architecture, and functionality. Starting from the beginning, Symas contributed continuously and heavily to the OpenLDAP project as a maintainer and developer.

With limited traction for its User Management efforts, the company evolved to survive the Dot-Bomb, doing custom programming, consulting, and continuing to provide enhancements and updates to OpenLDAP. Ultimately, the company focused all its efforts at building a commercial technical support, training, and consulting company around OpenLDAP. Today, Symas is committed to helping enterprises introduce new directory database applications for security, identity and network management and assisting them in converting their existing directories off of older proprietary directory products.

As enterprise demand has increased, Symas has responded by increasing its support and strengthening its commercial OpenLDAP offerings. The result is Symas™ OpenLDAP™ Directory Services, the leading distribution of OpenLDAP and associated Open Source technologies. Companies like Zimbra (Yahoo!), EMC, Sun, Sendmail, MDSI, Ventyx, Airwide, and Fidelity National Information Systems rely on Symas and Symas OpenLDAP for directory technology integrated into their offerings.

Founder Biographies

Howard Chu (Chief Technology Officer and Chief Architect): Specialist in distributed information technologies including X.500/LDAP at U. Michigan. Experience at JPL, Locus Computing, and Platinum Technologies. Member of the OpenLDAP Core Team.

Matthew Hardin (VP Product Engineering): Core developer and development executive for user management, networking and file management products at Locus and Platinum Technologies.

Marty Heyman (President): Marketing and Development Executive at IBM, Locus Computing, Palyn-Gould Group and two software start-ups since acquired by Microsoft and EMC.

Charles Noland (CEO): Banker and financial analyst in software and bio-tech. Consultant to start-ups seeking funding including executive role in early phase bio-tech venture.