The Informix Software, Inc, brain drain continues: veteran Steve Sommer, most recently vice president of enterprise solutions, and Tim Shetler, formerly vice president for product management, have both just left the troubled Menlo Park, California database company. Both executives have left voluntarily to join startups, rather than having been shown the door, but their departure – along with such recent high-level company figures as briefly- tenured chief financial officer Alan Hendricks, who quit after three months when those now notorious first quarter figures were announced (CI No 3,153) – leaves last week’s appointee as chief executive officer, Bob Finocchio (CI No 3,209), with fewer warm bodies to try and turn this particular oil tanker around. Sommer ran all Informix’s marketing during its successful bid to be taken seriously as an alternative to Oracle Corp from 1992 to the end of 1995, but after Informix’s $400m buyout of Illustra Technologies, Inc, officers of that company started taking plum jobs at the newly-merged hybrid company. As a result Sommer was moved from VP worldwide marketing last June to the vaguer role of VP for enterprise solutions, covering vertical strategies, with his responsibilities changing after the first quarter re- organization the company attempted following its poor showing ($140.1m loss on $133.7m revenue) to also cover data warehouse. Sommer claims his departure is not so much linked to his shifting responsibilities as to the fact that the past seven months the headhunters have been calling like crazy. He is decamping to Portal Information Network, Inc, a Cupertino based provider of customer management software to internet service providers), where he will be in charge of all marketing and business development. Ironically, the company’s product, Infranet, runs on Oracle, a company he has battled with for his entire database industry career. For his part, Shetler has also recently quit his job at Informix to become head of marketing at a start-up, this time for a Hewlett-Packard Co spinout attempting to capitalize on research into the topic of in-memory database management systems. Sommer claims that the number one priority for large Silicon Valley companies is trying to retain their staff given the mini- boom in startup activity; according to conversations with his headhunters there are currently 40 VP marketing, 30 to 40 VP sales and 30 to 40 CEO placement projects ongoing on the West Coast alone. Informix used to have really low attrition rates, something like between eight and ten per cent, versus the 20% that’s the industry average. Since the Q1 results I’d say that’s easily gone up to the industry [norm], he adds. Finocchio will probably have to devote at least some time in the crucial next couple of months attempting to achieve the right balance between cutting costs and returning to profitability that way (Informix has cut 10% of headcount, 460 staff, the past three months, 5% by natural attrition and 5% by active severance), and getting the right sort of management talent to join his company in favor of some shiny new vehicle, crammed with new possibilities and no baggage. It could be a tough call at times, for if he takes the easy option and just brings in old chums from his previous company, networking maven 3Com Corp, he may place people in software marketing and other roles who just don’t know the field well enough; or he may have to lure people to Informix with such ridiculously attractive compensation and stock packages that his stockholders will soon start howling. Either way, people like Sommer leaving Informix is not a great start for Finocchio’s administration, which has no CFO at all and no clear marketing czar either.
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