By Siobhan Kennedy
Inprise Corp, the Scotts Valley, California based software vendor, was this week forced to announce the resignations of its chairman and CEO, Del Yocam, and CFO Kathleen Fisher. In a two paragraph statement, the development tools, middleware and systems management company said it had established an interim management committee to take over the running of the business until the two executives are replaced. The committee consists of Jay Leite, formerly VP of business development, who now becomes interim CFO; James Weil and John Floisand, the presidents of the company’s two divisions, Inprise and borland.com, and Hobart McK Birmingham, VP and general counsel. The management committee will report to an executive committee of the board of directors.
No explanations were given for the departure of either Yocam or Fisher. A spokesperson for Inprise said the two had left for personal reasons and hadn’t given any information as to where they planned to go next. Yocam had held his position with the company for nearly two and half years while Fisher was CFO for almost two years. The surprise news comes in the light of poor fourth quarter results and widespread job cuts. At the end of January, Inprise Corp, formerly Borland International Inc until it was renamed last April, announced net income of $3.5m on revenues down 3.1% year-over-year at $48.1m. The bottom line was aided significantly by one-time gains and, excluding extraordinary items, the company actually saw a pro-forma loss of $0.08 per share – for a quarter when Wall Street was expecting a profit of $0.04 per share.
At the same time, Jocam announced restructuring plans, effectively breaking the business into two divisions. Inprise, based in San Mateo, focuses on enterprise software, while borland.com, based in Scotts Valley, concentrates on web tools and services. The company also cut 20% of its overall workforce of around 950 staff, a move which followed the loss of 125 staff in October 1998.
At least one analyst ComputerWire spoke to viewed the announcement with some skepticism: For both Del and Kathleen to leave at the same time indicates they were asked to leave, said Anne Thomas, senior consultant with the Siebold Group, I would imagine the board wasn’t pleased with the company’s performance and doing it this way gave them an opportunity to go with grace. Thomas said some of Inprise’s problems stemmed from its acquisition of Visigenic Software in November 1997.
When it bought Visigenics, Inprise elected to keep the people in San Mateo rather than move them to Scotts Valley, so there was never really a cohesive feel in the company, she said, and any staff related to enterprise-based stuff did their best to get up to Visigenics because it was more exciting. The only bridge was the JBuilder Java development tool and most of those developers upped and moved to San Mateo. Jocam realized that the original Borland environment was getting lost and people were disgruntled so he decided to split the company back into two distinct entities again, to give both a chance to focus on their individual markets, Thomas said.
The refocusing appeared to pay off with the likes of Oracle opting to license Inprise’s VisiBroker object request broker technology, she added, but nonetheless the web tools market is rife with competition. It’s a hard market, with Microsoft, Oracle, BEA and IBM as competitors, she said, but Inprise really has excellent products, it has the best Corba, the best tools and the best application management software available. But having the best offerings doesn’t necessarily mean you survive.
One possible option would be for Inprise to sell off its San Mateo tools arm. I don’t know if this latest move signals that the technology’s up for sale but the company would be really foolish if they weren’t considering offering it, Thomas said. When Del took over, I know his remit was to strengthen the company up and get it ready for a sale, but that hasn’t happened yet. In terms of a likely buyer, the analyst added that Oracle could perhaps fit the bill. It certainly matches with the rest of what Oracle’s doing, but it doesn’t tend to go round buying up companies so who knows, she said.
