While it may look like these two events – Mr Hovsepian’s rise and Mr Seibt’s departure – are directly related, people familiar with the situation say that the two events are not exactly causally linked even though their timing was close. Novell’s spokesperson, Bruce Lowry, was not willing to give any reasons for Mr Seibt’s departure, only to say that it was done through his own free will and that he had submitted his letter of resignation to Novell’s chairman and CEO, Jack Messman, and that Mr Messman had accepted it.
Mr Hovsepian is widely expected to eventually take the reins of Novell from Mr Messman, the outside exec who was brought into Novell as chairman and CEO from Cambridge Technology Partners, an IT consulting firm located outside of Boston. (This is where Novell is now headquartered, and with the addition of SUSE and Ximian, Novell’s corporate center of gravity has been shifting eastward since Mr Messman took over.) Novell acquired Cambridge Technology in July 2001 for $266 million as a means of gaining some consulting businesses, and to get Mr Messman, who is now 63, as its top executive; he was president and CEO at Cambridge.
The top spot at Novell opened up when Eric Schmidt jumped at the chance to become chairman of search engine juggernaut Google several years prior to it going public. Mr Schmidt used to be chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems. It is unclear when Mr Messman plans to retire from the CEO position, but clearly the company needs to get itself together for a clear line of succession. When Chris Stone, Novell’s vice chairman and chief technology officer, left the company in November 2004 after moving Novell into the open source markets and spearheading the acquisition of Ximian and SUSE, this left a power vacuum. (Last month, Stone was named president and CEO of StreamServe, a company that peddles business communication management products.)
It is unclear if Mr Seibt’s resignation caused Mr Hovsepian’s appointment as president of worldwide field operations at Novell and executive vice president of the company, or if this was already in the works. Sources close to the firm say that Mr Seibt was not fired, but really did leave of his own accord, and indicated further that he was not jockeying for the top job at Novell. What can be said from the outside for sure is that both Mr Seibt and Mr Hovsepian seem qualified for the job.
Mr Seibt got his start in information technology 27 years ago as a salesperson at IBM Germany, and eventually rose to become one of the managing directors of that unit of Big Blue. He was eventually appointed as vice president of software sales and marketing for IBM’s North American operations, before eventually being given the dubious job of managing the whole OS/2 operating system project. In 1998, after leaving IBM, Mr Seibt joined United Internet, while in January 2003, he was named CEO of SUSE. A year later, Novell owned it and he was named president of Novell’s European operations.
Mr Hovsepian is also an ex-IBMer, and spent 17 years in various positions. After leaving IBM a few years ago, Mr Hovsepian worked at Internet Capital Group, a publicly traded investment company that bought up B2B and e-commerce companies as the dot-com boom was bursting and that has shrunk from $123.7 million in sales in 2001 to $52.4 million in sales in 2004.
It comes as no surprise that Mr Hovsepian, who is 44, jumped at the chance to join Novell in June 2003 as president of its North American operations. Mr Messman, in making the announcement of Mr Hovsepian’s appointment, said that Mr Hovsepian had demonstrated the ability to streamline Novell’s operations, deliver solid financial results, and stay focused on the customer. Now, Mr Hovsepian will be in charge of all of Novell’s other presidents and will help them do the same.
Mr Hovsepian has assumed Mr Seibt’s role in running Novell EMEA in the interim, and it is apparently up to his discretion as to whether or not Novell should name a replacement or let him take over the unit himself. With Novell’s Linux business not growing as fast as the company would like, and being quite a bit smaller than Red Hat’s Linux business, Mr Hovsepian has his work cut out for him. Novell bought SUSE to make money more than it did to make noise or friends. It has certainly done well in the latter two areas, but the making money part has been more problematic.
