StarBase Corp of Irvine, California has replaced the senior management team it hired a year ago to lead its transition from a research and development company to a real business, saying that their job is finished. StarBase now produces integrated team development tools, designed to improve the efficiency of developing business applications. The company’s board hired Alan Davis as president and chief executive officer and Robert Leimena as chief financial officer, and gave them the job of putting together an operating infrastructure and finding their own replacements. The company also brought in three board members to help with the job. All three, Robert Ferguson, Gary Gratny and Michael Lyones, are also leaving. Taking over as the company’s new president is Donald Farrow, who had been vice president of sales and marketing. Farrow, whose resume includes a stint as vice president sales Symantec Corp and president and chief executive of Menlo Corp, reports to StarBase chairman William Stow. The departing executives came on board just as StarBase was finishing work on its premier product StarTeam, a collaborative development system for five to 20-man software development teams. Since then StarTeam, which creates servers that run on NT and clients for any Windows platform, has gone to a second release and been Internet-enabled. Asymetrix Corp, Haht Software and Symantec have all taken this second release, Versions 2.0, to bundle with their own software. Asymetrix and Haht will use Versions 2.0 to enable their customers to manage intranet and Web sites and Java application development. Symantec and StarBase have entered a joint marketing agreement and StarBase now markets Symantec’s Visual Cafi Pro. Stow says company sales have started growing at 50% a month since the Web-enabling kit was released at the end of the summer, growth that should be reflected in StarBase’s financial results which are due this week. The company’s also a month away from beta testing StarTeam 3.0, due out by the end of the second quarter.
