Collax, of Freiburg, Germany, will open its Bedford, Massachusetts, offices in June. Hunter will help recruit the rest of the U.S. team and build channel relationships. She started her career at Digital Equipment Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp. and later became general manager of the UnitedLinux initiative. More recently, she worked as director of marketing and business development for Open Source Development Labs.

Collax was founded in August 2005 by German entrepreneur Olaf Jacobi. Its flagship product, Collax Business Server, had been around for more than seven years under the name Ben Hur. Pyramid, also based in Freiburg, had successfully sold more than 7,000 installations when Collax took over with a more professional organization and renamed the product.

Jacobi hired some well-known managers, among them former SUSE Linux Chief Technology Officer Boris Nalbach and Chief Financial Officer William K. Hite. The new chief executive also won venture capital financing, including '5 million (US$6.4 million) from Wellington Partners of Munich and Atlas Ventures in Boston. Later, Intel Capital joined with another '2 million.

Collax Business Server is an all-purpose offering for SMB customers. Based on Linux and other open-source software, it can serve as a groupware, file and print, mail, proxy and Web server as well as a VPN (virtual private network) gateway and firewall. All that technology is hidden from the end user behind a management interface. Collax sells it with or without appliance hardware under a subscription model with managed support.