ActiveGrid Inc. has announced that Christopher Keene, a 24-year veteran of the high-tech industry, has joined the company as chairman and chief executive officer. Keene comes to ActiveGrid to drive aggressive growth as Web 2.0 technologies continue to bring dramatic changes to enterprise computing. ActiveGrid has been a pioneer in ushering in technologies such as lightweight architecture and lightweight integration to the enterprise. As a result, organizations have reduced their backlog of integration projects to allow its top people to focus on their core business challenges. Founder Peter Yared continues to help realize ActiveGrid's mission to simplify the development and deployment of rich, interactive Web applications in his role as chief technology officer. "I'm delighted that Chris, with his very impressive track record, is joining ActiveGrid to lead the company so I can focus on our technology. It is our goal to stay on the leading edge of providing customers with the speed, ease and cost-effectiveness of Enterprise Web 2.0. I am personally excited to focus even more energy on ActiveGrid's customers and technology," Yared said. Keene was the founder, in 1991, of Persistence Software, a San Mateo, CA-based company that created a new approach for managing data in high-transaction banking and communications systems. Persistence Software investors included Cisco, Intel, Reuters and Sun Microsystems. The company went public in 1999 on the NASDAQ exchange and was sold in 2004 to Progress software. After leaving Persistence Software in 2005, Keene spent a year in France as chairman of Reportive Software, a Paris-based maker of business- intelligence tools, and as an adjunct professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at INSEAD, a leading graduate business school. Before founding Persistence Software, Keene was an engagement manager with McKinsey & Company in New York City and Hamburg. Before that, he was a software team lead at Hewlett-Packard and was founder of Medaid, whose medical-office software product line later was sold to Healthdata Inc. He earned an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, and holds a Bachelors Degree in mathematics from Stanford University. "Leading-edge web applications like Yahoo and Google are very different than the web applications built ten years ago, yet the tools corporate developers are using to build their applications by and large have not changed over the last ten years," Keene said. "I believe that corporate developers are looking for a new generation of tools that radically simplify the development of corporate web applications."