Michael Seifert (programmer)

Last updated
Michael Seifert
Michael Seifert.jpg
BornFebruary 1969 (age 54)
Copenhagen, Denmark
NationalityDanish
Alma mater University of Copenhagen
OccupationFormer CEO of Sitecore
Known for DikuMUD, Sitecore
Awards2013 IT-Prisen

Michael Seifert (born February 1969 in Copenhagen) is a Danish computer programmer, inventor, [1] businessman, and entrepreneur in the IT industry. He is co-developer of DikuMUD, a popular multiplayer text-based role-playing game codebase, and former chief executive officer of Sitecore, a global customer experience management software company, which he co-founded in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2001. In 2013 Seifert won Denmark's annual IT Prize (IT-Prisen) for lifetime achievement in the field of information technology. [2]

Contents

Early life

Seifert was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in February 1969 to Erik J. Thomsen and Kirsten Seifert, who divorced when he was two years old. His great-grandfather was Carl Seifert (d. 1935), a Danish blacksmith and manufacturer who was recorded in the Kraks Blue Book (Kraks Blå Bog) of well-known Danes in 1929.

Throughout his childhood and high school years, Seifert resided with his mother and two brothers on the Danish island of Bornholm. [3] [4] From the age of 11, Seifert spent summers and Christmas holidays in San Rafael, California with his father, who immigrated to the United States and founded the microcomputer products firm Sun-Flex Company, which was later sold to Xidex Corporation. [5] There, his father co-invented an anti-glare device for computer terminals, which was awarded United States Patent number 4,253,737 in 1981. [6] It was during the first summer holiday with his father that Seifert became interested in computers and wrote his first computer program. [7] At age 15, with the help of a friend and his mother, Seifert started his first IT company, Danbyte, which imported computer disks to Bornholm. [8] [9]

From 1990 to 1996, Seifert attended the University of Copenhagen, where he received a Master of Science degree in computer science and an exam.art in human computer interaction. His 135-page university thesis, Evaluation and Implementation of Operating System Support for Multiple Network Interfaces was co-authored with Ole Sas Thrane and published in 1995. [10] [11] It was at DIKU (Danish: Datalogisk Institut, Københavns Universitet)—the department of computer science at the University of Copenhagen—where Seifert got involved in the DikuMUD project and also met the colleagues with whom he would later found Sitecore.

DikuMUD

In June 1990 at DIKU, Seifert joined Hans Henrik Stærfeldt, Tom Madsen, and Sebastian Hammer (and later Katja Nyboe) to work on the development of DikuMUD, a multiplayer text-based role-playing game, which is a type of MUD. DikuMUD became one of the first multi-user games to become popular as a freely available program for its gameplay and similarity to Dungeons & Dragons.

At the time, DikuMUD was only available to university students with Internet access, so Seifert solicited funds from the Tuborg Foundation, run by Danish brewing company Carlsberg Group, in order to purchase modems and hubs to make DikuMUD more widely available to the Danish population at large. Seifert won the funds by putting a special Tuborg-branded drink into the game and awarded points to players who drank it (in the game). [12]

Seifert and the team released the DikuMUD source code in October 1990 and it became the root of one of the largest trees of derived code from a MUD-like source code package. After the last official release of DikuMUD in July 1991, the team moved on to the development of DikuMUD II, which continues to run today under the name of Valhalla MUD. [13]

After graduating, Seifert made efforts to commercialize DikuMUD and, later, start an online casino business, neither of which proved fruitful. [3] [4] In 1998, with fellow University of Copenhagen students Thomas Albert, Jakob Christensen, Peter Christensen, and Ole Sas Thrane, Seifert co-founded systems integration company Pentia A/S, from which Sitecore was later spun off as a separate business entity.

Sitecore

Seifert started Pentia in 1998 as a systems integration company focused on Microsoft technologies. As consultants, Seifert and his team were hired to design and implement websites, among other things, for a number of large Danish international corporations. To make their jobs easier, Thrane had devised a set of automated tools and methods for developing and managing websites. At the time, making changes to a website required the expertise of a programmer or developer. The group recognized a growing demand for their website services and decided to turn Thrane's invention [14] into a marketable product (that would today be classified as a content management system).

In 2001, Seifert and his Pentia co-founders spun off Sitecore as a separate business entity, which initially sold content management systems in the Danish market but has grown profitably into a recognized global provider of customer experience management software with more than 1,000 employees and competition that includes IBM, Oracle Corporation, Salesforce.com, and Adobe Systems. [9] Seifert served as CEO and was initially joined by Ole Sas Thrane and Jakob Christensen.

In 2016, private equity firm EQT acquired a majority stake in Sitecore valued at $1.14 billion. [15] Seifert served as CEO until 2017, when he was replaced by Mark Frost. [16]

In 2014 Seifert was included in the Kraks Blue Book (Kraks Blå Bog). [17]

Awards

Seifert is credited as the co-inventor of a method for collecting human experience analytics data, which was awarded United States Patent number 8,255,526 in August 2012. [1]

In 2013, Seifert joined the likes of Skype co-founder Janus Friis and Turbo Pascal author Anders Hejlsberg as a recipient of Denmark's annual IT Prize (IT-Prisen) for lifetime achievement in the field of information technology. [2]

Related Research Articles

AberMUD was the first popular open source MUD. It was named after the town Aberystwyth, in which it was written. The first version was written in B by Alan Cox, Richard Acott, Jim Finnis, and Leon Thrane based at University of Wales, Aberystwyth for an old Honeywell mainframe and opened in 1987.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UCPH Department of Computer Science</span> Department at University of Copenhagen

The UCPH Department of Computer Science is a department in the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It is the longest established department of Computer Science in Denmark and was founded in 1970 by Turing Award winner Peter Naur. As of 2021, it employs 82 academic staff, 126 research staff and 38 support staff. It is consistently ranked the top Computer Science department in the Nordic countries, and in 2017 was placed 9th worldwide by the Academic Ranking of World Universities.

DikuMUD is a multiplayer text-based role-playing game, which is a type of multi-user domain (MUD). It was written in 1990 and 1991 by Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert, and Hans Henrik Stærfeldt at DIKU —the department of computer science at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The MUD trees below depict hierarchies of derivation among MUD codebases. Solid lines between boxes indicate code relationships, while dotted lines indicate conceptual relationships. Dotted boxes indicate that the codebase is outside the family depicted.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tuborg Brewery</span> Danish brewing company

Tuborg is a Danish brewing company founded in 1873 on a harbour in Hellerup, an area North of Copenhagen, Denmark. Since 1970 it has been part of the Carlsberg Group. The brewery's flagship, the Tuborg pilsner, was brewed for the first time in 1880.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Søren Pilmark</span> Danish actor

Søren Louis Pilmark is a Danish actor. Pilmark has worked as a film and theatrical actor, a director, and as an author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mickey Beyer Clausen</span> Danish-born, entrepreneur and philanthropist (born 1975)

Mickey Beyer-Clausen is a Danish-born, entrepreneur and philanthropist, living in Southampton New York.

Sitecore is a customer experience management company that provides web content management, and multichannel marketing automation software. The company was founded in 2001 in Denmark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Krass Clement</span> Danish photographer

Krass Clement Kay Christensen is a Danish photographer who has specialized in documentary work. He graduated as a film director in Copenhagen but soon turned to still photography, publishing his first book Skygger af øjeblikke in 1978. He has since become an active documentary photographer, focusing on people from both Denmark and abroad. His earlier work is black and white but since 2000 he has also worked in colour.

Poul Lange, also known as Poul Hans Lange, is a Danish illustrator, graphic designer, photographer, fine artist and children's book creator, who has won numerous awards for his design work. Since the early 1990s, he has lived and worked in the United States, first in New York City, and then after 2012 in Los Angeles. In 2011 Lange founded "Chocolate Factory Publishing" with his wife Kayoko Suzuki-Lange. In 2013, Chocolate Factory Publishing released the award-winning children's book app, The Book of Holes.

Franz-Michael Skjold Mellbin is a Danish professional foreign service officer currently serving as Ambassador of Denmark to the Philippines and Palau.

Sven Julius Risom was a Danish architect who worked mainly in the style of Nordic Classicism.

Andreas Jeppe Iversen, usually known as A.J. Iversen, was a Danish cabinetmaker and furniture designer. From the 1920s, his collaboration with architects and designers paved the way for the style which later became known as Danish modern.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jens Ingwersen</span> Danish architect

Jens Ingwersen was a Danish architect during the transition from neo-classicism to functionalism. He was the architect of the telephone company KTAS and is the man behind most of this company's buildings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jørgen Buhl Rasmussen</span>

Jørgen Buhl Rasmussen is the Danish Chief Executive of the Danish multi-national brewing company Carlsberg Group, based in Copenhagen in Denmark. Carlsberg is the name of a district of Copenhagen. The main shareholder of Carlsberg is the Carlsberg Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karina Bell</span> Danish actress

Karina Bell was a Danish actress. She primarily worked as a film actress and was active from 1919 to 1933. Bell was credited in at least 21 Danish, German, and Swedish films during her career.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kåre Schultz</span> Danish business executive (born 1961)

Kåre Schultz is a Danish business executive. Was the chief executive officer of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries between September 2017 - December 2022.

Gads Forlag, formerly G. E. C. Gad, is a publishing agent in Denmark. It is owned by G.E.C. Gads Fond, a publishing house based in Copenhagen, Denmark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Heyman</span> Danish merchant (1837–1893)

Philip Wulff Heyman was a Jewish Danish industrialist who co-founded the Tuborg Brewery. He was also a pioneer of Danish butter and bacon exports to the United Kingdom.

References

  1. 1 2 Seifert and Christensen, United States Patent 8,255,526, "A method for collecting human experience analytics data", August 2012
  2. 1 2 "IT superman wins Denmark's most important IT prize". Computerworld DK. 14 March 2013.
  3. 1 2 "Bootstrapping a Global Software Product Company Using Services From Denmark: Sitecore CEO Michael Seifert". One Million by One Million. 21 June 2014.
  4. 1 2 "Michael Seifert - The Unknown Adventure". Bornholm Magazine #3. 15 Sep 2013. Archived from the original on 2014-10-21.
  5. ↑ "Company Briefs". The New York Times. 15 June 1984.
  6. ↑ Thomsen and Brennan, United States Patent 4,253,737, "Anti-Glare device for a computer terminal display tube", March 1981
  7. ↑ "Meet Sitecore CEO - a passionate super geek". Computerworld DK. 29 Sep 2009.
  8. ↑ "Award Winner thinking globally from the beginning". Berlingske Business. 15 June 2012.
  9. 1 2 "Can Michael Seifert's Sitecore Be The Customer Experience Management Platform of The Future?". Forbes. 16 Oct 2014.
  10. ↑ DIKU 1995 Yearbook of Theses Published
  11. ↑ Michael Seifert, Ole Sass Thrane, “Evaluation and Implementation of Operating System Support for Multiple Network Interfaces”, Google Books, 1995
  12. ↑ Published/living Valhalla source code with Tuborg reference
  13. ↑ DikuMUD
  14. ↑ Thrane and Christensen, United States Patent 7,856,345, "Method for building and managing a web site", December 2010
  15. ↑ "New Majority Investment Values Sitecore at $1B". CMSWire. 1 April 2016.
  16. ↑ "Sitecore Appoints Mark Frost CEO to 'Drive Next Phase of Growth'". CMSWire. 6 July 2017.
  17. ↑ "Newly admitted Kraks Blue Book 2014-15". Kraks Blå Bog. 22 May 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.