After being shunted sideways to director of business development back in April, Stewart Schuster, the former Sybase Inc executive vice-president of marketing, credited as being the first to position an entire company and its products with the term client-server architecture, left the company last month. After nine years in charge of worldwide marketing, Schuster appears to have paid the price for a series of stumbles that straddled the collapse of Sybase’s relationship with Microsoft Corp, the seeming inability to correct the database’s ability to scale and its performance problems, and delays in bringing new versions to market. Schuster, now working as a consultant, board member and investor for software companies, was last week appointed to the board of San Mateo, California-based object-to-relational house, Persistence Software Inc, in a move that puzzled some experienced Sybase-watchers, given his previous apparent distaste for object-oriented techniques. Former vice-president of worldwide marketing at Sybase’s PowerSoft Corp unit, Tom Herring, took over Schuster’s role back in July.
