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The executive shuffle
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June 29, 1998: 3:05 p.m. ET
WebLogic, Smart name new CEOs; execs leaving Computer Associates
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SAN FRANCISCO (The Red Herring) - For WebLogic, the search is over. The software company's new CEO was with it all the while.
Board member and angel investor Ali Kutay will be named the company's president and chief executive officer on Monday, succeeding cofounder and Chief Technical Officer Paul Ambrose. The Java startup makes applications server software that provides the plumbing for distributed computing -- cool stuff that promises to run anywhere, make geeks happy and lower your chief information officer's aspirin budget.
While serving as CEO of FormTek, a Lockheed Martin software subsidiary, Kutay has followed WebLogic through changes: Former President David Parker resigned last year, after failing to follow through with a round of venture funding; Peter Nordberg, who was vice president of sales as well as acting president, left recently to join 2Bridge Software, another San Francisco startup.
"We had a search, which wasn't producing the results we were looking for," says Kutay. "And some of the board members started putting pressure on me." His fellow board members include famed tech marketer Regis McKenna and Frank Caufield of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, so one imagines the boardroom must have gotten pretty hot.
"Ali is an entrepreneur," says McKenna. "I knew it wouldn't be long, so we just kept working on him." McKenna notes that Mr. Kutay would have made the move sooner, but he made a point of contacting all of FormTek's customers around the globe -- the client list includes Daimler-Benz, Volvo, and U.S. Steel. (Of course, it couldn't have hurt WebLogic when Kutay mentioned it as his next destination; the startup's next target market is the large in-house programming staffs of Fortune 1,000 companies.)
How will Kutay fit into WebLogic's geek-centric culture? "I'm part of the culture here," says the new CEO; after all, he's been a board member since 1996. "Like Scott (Dietzen, WebLogic's VP of marketing), and (Sun's) James Gosling, I'm from the original Carnegie Mellon clique. Back in the '70s, it was a dream to develop a language like Java. Running a large business, we always had to struggle with (supporting) six or seven Unix platforms, as well as Windows NT. You have 50 percent of your engineers worrying about bug fixes."
While he's pretty confident in his team, Kutay still needs to hire a VP of sales to replace Nordberg. WebLogic's board hasn't met since the CEO appointment, so it's up in the air whether Ambrose or Kutay will be chairman of the company -- not that Kutay thinks it matters much. "I have so much respect for Paul as an entrepreneur, and he has so much respect for me as someone who's helped him and the company out," says Kutay.
Smart's new CEO no SAP
Bryan Plug, the former CEO of Intel-SAP joint venture Pandesic, isn't headed back to SAP as some folks expected. Instead, he's headed to Austin, Texas, to head up e-commerce firm Smart Technologies. Well, not quite headed there. He's going to stay in the Bay Area, and maintain an office in the company's Austin headquarters.
"As a software company, it's very important for us to have a presence in the Bay Area," says Plug. "Of course, we'll continue to have a significant presence in the Austin area."
Won't it be hard to run a company by remote control? "If I may," ventures the peripatetic CEO, "the concept of a geographic location to a technology company is really obsolete. In my experience prior to Smart, I could be in any city any day of the week."
One person who is moving somewhere is Smart founder Jeff DeCoux, who plans to head a new startup funded by Austin Ventures. DeCoux is handing over a company in pretty good shape, though. "The revenue target is $30 million for 1998," he says. That's two and a half times 1997's figure of $8 million. "We are trying a novel approach to an IPO, which is to be profitable first." Customers include Motorola and Compaq.
Will SAP miss Plug? "I did consider a number of roles within SAP," he says. "But I'm still in the ecosystem."(SAP is an investor in Smart.)
Computer Associates spins off executives
It's hard enough to be the software giant no one understands. Now one thing seems to be understood by a number of Computer Associates execs: It's time to bail. While CA has been reorganizing its service offerings, the moves seem to have less to do with internal problems than they do with attractive opportunities elsewhere.
Steve Gersten, a 15-year CA veteran, left to become network security company Fortress Technologies' vice president of worldwide sales in April. Chief Financial Officer Pete Schwartz has retired. Adam Yahre, who was heading up Web-hosting unit NetHaven, left after that division was reorganized. And former Vice President of Marketing T.M. Ravi is in the Bay Area now, hunting for a new startup to head.
Fresh from a breakfast at Buck's Diner in Woodside -- where he spotted Keynote Systems CEO Umang Gupta, among other movers and shakers -- Ravi dropped by the Herring offices to mull over his next step. A veteran of IBM and Hewlett-Packard, he also founded Media Blitz, a storage software maker he sold to Cheyenne, which in turn was bought by Computer Associates. He's ready to run a small company again -- and plans to return to the Bay Area.
"The problem with the Valley is that it's very inward-looking -- trendy almost like L.A. is trendy," he says. "The market out there, worldwide, is not trendy." He's not looking for something sexy, he says -- though he admits that the hot fields of network security and e-commerce have their attractions.
Talent pool
Theo Nissim has left Sun's enterprise server software business to head up engineering at AdKnowledge ... FollowUp.Net has hired Paul Stanco away from Cendant, where he developed the interactive marketer's NetMarket Web site; he'll be the vice president of business development for the messaging outsourcing startup ... InType, which makes database publishing tools, named MapQuest founder Perry Evans president ... Adobe named Hewlett-Packard executive Carol Mills to its board, bolstering its push into software sales to large corporations ... Judy Balint was promoted to executive vice president of E*Trade, and will also serve as chief operating officer of E*Trade's international subsidiary; Jerry Gramaglia also joined the online trader as senior vice president of sales, marketing, and communications ... Cisco CTO Judy Estrin joined Disney's board, adding technical cred to a company pushing hard into the online world. 
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