Events
At Sun
Management
Rearrangements: Pat Sueltz Exits
In
a surprise move, Patricia Sueltz, executive vice president of
Sun's professional services business unit, left Sun for a new post
as executive vice president and president of technology marketing
and systems at CRM service provider Salesforce.com.
Sueltz
has joined Salesfoce.com just ahead of its planned IPO and her
speedy move was required so that her name could be listed on the
S1 filing for the offering. We’d
expect her to be a real contributor to the on-line application
provider.
Sueltz
was executive vice president of Sun Services for the past two
years, but the group had recently been reorganized and some
insiders felt that she had lost some power in the new
arrangements. At
Salesforce.com, Sueltz will be in charge of nearly everything
except Sales and Finance, which should give her plenty of room to
move.
Sun
quickly appointed Marissa Peterson to fill Sueltz’ role.
Peterson will assume this new role in addition to her current
responsibilities as chief customer advocate and executive vice
president, worldwide operations.
Sun Acquires
Kealia, Andy
Bechtolsheim
As
part of its quarterly hardware and software announcements last
month, Sun announced that it would be acquiring Kealia, a
privately held Palo Alto-based company, established to develop
server technology. Kealia was started by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of Sun’s
original founders.
Sun
CEO Scott McNealy was pleased to note that the acquisition brings
them not only new technology, but also the return of a leading
computer architect. McNealy
hopes that the return of “employee number one” will mark the
start of a new wave of innovation at Sun.
Bechtolsheim is noted for his clever designs and he and
McNealy are looking to him to help move Sun into the new,
competitive parts of the server marketplace.
Kealia
will become the Advanced Systems Technology group within Sun's
Volume Systems Products organization headed by Executive Vice
President Neil Knox. Bechtolsheim will return to Sun as senior
vice president and chief architect within the Volume Systems
Products group, reporting to Knox, and will also be a member of
Sun's Executive Management Group, led by McNealy.
Sun SW Announcements
Kealia,
of course, is only one of the many acquisitions Sun has made in
the last year or two. For
example, Sun has spent several hundred million dollars on buying
the components it has built into its N1 offering so far.
These include Pirus, Terraspring,
CenterRun, Waveset, and Nauticus.
Sun’s not alone in using an acquisition strategy to
quickly fill out its portfolio in a new area – HP has been doing
a lot of that, too.
The
issue, of course, isn’t how much you buy, but rather:
-
What
do you pay for it?
-
How
good is it (both on its own and as a complementary part of
your vision)?
-
What
does it cost you in time and resources to integrate the
acquisition?
-
After
the work is done, how well can you sell the product?
We’d
doubt the buying spree is over – or that Sun can pick and choose
without competition. In
addition to HP, IBM, Veritas, and others are also looking to fill
out their Adaptive/On Demand/etc., etc. strategies and there are
lots of little pieces that it’s tempting to buy rather than
build – especially if you can buy them from a business partner
who’s already built the software to integrate with your
underlying platform/framework.
Next
week is Sun’s Software Analyst Briefing, so we’ll save the
comments on Java Desktop, the Java Enterprise stack, and other
components of the Sun software strategy until after that meeting
when we’ll cover them in detail.
(back to top)
