Six Apart acquires Rojo Networks

I’m very happy to announce that Six Apart has acquired Rojo Networks. As many of you know, Rojo runs the popular Rojo and Nooz services.

Not only are we excited to be affiliated with Rojo and Nooz, we are thrilled about the people and technologies that join Six Apart through this acquisition. Four people will become core members of the Six Apart Team: Chris Alden, Aaron Emigh, Andrew Bunner and Jim Ramsey.

Chris, Rojo’s CEO, will become the vice president and general manager of Movable Type, and will work to expand Movable Type’s presence in the enterprise blogging market. Aaron, Rojo’s CTO, will become vice president and general manager of core technologies, working with the product groups to unify our engineering efforts and provide leadership on shared code, services and APIs. Brad Fitzpatrick will continue in his role as chief architect within the new core technologies group, expanding Six Apart’s core infrastructure code to scale for our future. Andrew Bunner, Rojo’s current director of engineering, will join the core technologies group to provide additional technical and management leadership. And Jim Ramsey will join the LiveJournal team doing front-end development. In addition, Ben Trott, in his role as CTO, will be a key advisor and contributor to the Core Technologies Group as he continues his work on Vox, our new personal blogging service.

I can’t express how excited I am that these four people with such deep knowledge and skills are joining Six Apart. I have spent a good deal of time with each of them and am convinced they will not only add momentum to our work, but be great additions to the team.

So who will run Rojo and Nooz? Good question. Rojo will initially be an independent subsidiary of Six Apart and continue to operate as usual. Chris and Aaron will continue to be involved with Rojo. Users will see no change in the quality of the services they receive. Rojo and Nooz will continue to be independent entities, and we expect to sell a majority interest in the services business within a few months. You can see more on Rojo’s blog as well.

And what does this mean for Six Apart? It means that Six Apart is continuing its aggressive strategy to remain the leader in blogging software and services through continued innovation, acquisitions and partnerships.