Sybase Inc president and chief operating officer John Chen has hired a bunch of executives who worked with him when he was chairman and chief executive of Siemens Pyramid Information Systems Inc, to put a business development plan together and run the company on a day-to-day basis, leaving CEO Mitchell Kertzman to do visionary work. In fact Chen’s hires which leave a gaping hole in Siemens Pyramid’s management structure are working on an operational plan from sales through customer relationships, partnerships, service and support that should prove a counter balance to the apparent makeover of the company’s management structure with executives from the PowerSoft PC software side of the company, from whence Kertzman hails. At the very least it should give Sybase back some much-needed enterprise focus. Chen’s been putting a team together since he came on board back in July (CI No 3,206). Chen’s replacement at Pyramid, Raj Nathan, joins Sybase as senior vice president, corporate programs. Nathan who was Chen’s vice president of research and development at Pyramid Is joined by Steve Capelli, now senoir vice president Sybase business development, and Richard LaBarbera, vice president worldwide customer services and support, both of whom are also on board from Pyramid. Sybase has also wooed Eric Miles, formerly vice president database products at Informix Software Inc, to be its senior vice president of product operations, filling the hole left by the departure of Sybase’s effective number two David Litwack earlier in the year (CI No 3,152). Linda Gladden, vice president of worldwide channels is on board from Sun Microsystems Inc. Gladden and LaBarbera’s positions are new. Chen claims he’s now got all of his management ducks in a row and plans to focus on growing Sybase’s ravished business in the areas of data warehousing, the Jaguar component transaction server (read middleware), and the SQL Anywhere mobile database. Clustering and Windows NT are his other targets. Chen expects this quarter to have shown something of a boost over the third quarter the company is currently in its quiet period but thinks it will be mid-1998 before the fruits of the new operations strategy contributes significantly to the bottom line.
