Youngjohns was one of a group of senior Sun Microsystems employees who moved from Sun to Callidus about two and a half years ago. Having used the Callidus application at Sun, members of the group saw its potential and decided they could do a better job of running the company and developing the market themselves.
During Youngjohn’s watch, the company and application direction solidified, revenue improved, and the company became an evangelist for the on-demand model. Over the last 12 months alone we exceeded $100m of revenue and have become the leader in the field of sales performance management, said Youngjohns. He will remain a member of the Callidus board of directors.
The position of CEO and president will be taken by Leslie Stretch, one of the original batch who left Sun to lead Callidus. Before the move to CEO he was senior vice president of global sales, marketing, and on-demand. The role of senior vice president of global sales will be taken by Bryan Burkhart, who has headed up the sales team within Callidus for the past three years.
In a statement announcing the changes, Callidus said the new leadership team is preparing for a new phase in the life-cycle of the company. I am delighted to be appointed to lead Callidus Software, said Stretch. Robert’s leadership guided Callidus through a growth generation stage and we are now beginning the next phase which is to prove that we can turn this growth into sustained profitability during 2008.
Callidus was one of the first enterprise-level software vendors to embrace the on-demand model, not only as an additional deployment model but also as a core part of its offering. It will continue to do so.
Our View
The interesting questions concern to what extent Youngjohns will be able to continue to evangelize on-demand at Microsoft, and whether he was taken on board to help galvanize the SaaS part of Microsoft’s software-plus-services position.
