Two of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Project Athena gurus are trading in their academic robes for business suits, and are setting up Geer-Zolot Associates Inc, a new company to expand on Athena’s technology and supply software and services for managing distributed environments. The Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Management Environment will play a key role in the company’s development, focusing on remote service management, network security and event notification. In the long term, it intends to produce a complete communications equipment for independent network service providers. The founders are Dan Geer, former manager of systems development on Athena, and Ken Zolot, the project’s technical supervisor for system development. Both founded the Innovative Technology Research Centre at DEC after their stints at the Massachusetts Institute. Project Athena was the seed-bed for Kerberos and the X Window System.
