---
title: "My Team Of The Year Award: IBM EightBar, Hursley Labs"
date: 2008-12-18T14:42:57Z
modified: 2008-12-18T14:42:57Z
permalink: "https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/my-team-of-the-year-award-ibm-eightbar-hursley-labs/"
type: post
status: publish
excerpt: ""
wpid: 1774
categories:
  - Uncategorized
timestamp: 2008-12-18T14:42:57Z
tags:
  - Uncategorized
---

[![](http://eightbar.co.uk/wp-content/themes/grassroots/images/header.jpg)

](http://eightbar.co.uk/)

As I [said on Twitter](http://twitter.com/monkchips/statuses/1055301818) a few days ago:

> My Team of 2008 award goes to IBM’s Eight Bar at Hursley Labs. RedMonk celebrates makers and doers – these guys exemplify getting on with it.

As regular readers will know I regularly ding IBM about its lack of a really strong grassroots-led innovation story. The company is great at top down, but bottom up, not so much. Which is why I rate the [EightBar](http://eightbar.co.uk/) [team](http://eightbar.co.uk/about/) so highly. Competition in this category was obviously very strong- I can point to any number of awesome teams in software development. BT’s [Osmosof](http://www.osmosoft.com/)t were a pretty strong second, but what tipped EightBar over the top for me was the contribution the Hursley crew made to [Chris Dalby](http://www.yellowpark.net/cdalby/)‘s [HomeCamp](http://homecamp.org.uk/). When about ten people come down from Hampshire on a Saturday to share their knowledge its heart-warming and hopefully planet cooling.

That’s the charm you see – HomeCamp is all about home automation, using home metering to improve the sustainability of our home lives. Andy Stanford Clark, IBM distinguished inventor, is building a community around IBM messaging microbroker technology (MQTT) for home consumption. Hursley is best known for Big Middleware generally and MQSeries specifically. Oh sorry did I say MQSeries? I of course meant WebSphereMQ. Seeing Hursley technology applied to home automation hacking, used by people that had never touched an IBM tool before, is pretty mind-blowing.

EightBar is trying to build [A Smarter Planet](http://smarterplanet.tumblr.com/).

Another reason EightBar won it for me was the emergence of epredator 2.0 – [Ian Hughes](http://eightbar.co.uk/about/epredator/) went through a stage earlier in 2008 when he came across as a negative influence – but towards the end of the year he is seemingly re-energised and ready to help EightBar make even more of a go of it. EightBar – activist evangelists.

So well done Andy, Dale, Ian, Graham, Laura, Nick and anyone else in the cluster. I bet [Roo](http://rooreynolds.com/) is kicking himself for joining the BBC and missing out on this ever so prestigious award 😉

Have a great Christmas folks!