Before becoming the CIO of Instaclustr, Michael founded and managed credativ and its Open Source Support Center. He bootstrapped the company to become a multi-national specialist for open source services. In the process, he helped numerous businesses improve their IT infrastructure by using pure open source solutions. On the community side, Michael has been a developer for nearly 30 years working on different open source projects, including well-known solutions like Debian and PostgreSQL. He has also engaged in significant open source evangelism and given related presentations at various events. Michael teaches open source infrastructure components at a local university as an adjunct professor.