IBM Corp’s Tivoli Systems Inc has been losing key staff over the past few months, analysts at Illuminata Inc point out. First executive vice president Martin Neath left in July to become president and COO of Austin, Texas-based start-up Works.com. Neath joined Tivoli in 1990, less than a year after it was formed as the seventh employee, and engineered the acquisition of Software Artistry Inc in January 1998.
Now, chief technology officer Tom Bishop has left to become CEO of another Austin-based start-up, CCM.net, an internet service provider currently changing itself into an ASP specializing in social services. Bishop was responsible for setting the technical direction across all product groups at Tivoli, managing the team behind the Tivoli Management Framework, and also acting as head of the company’s embedded and OEM business unit – one of the most important growth areas for systems management firms.
Before Tivoli, Bishop was senior scientist for Locus Computing Corp, the inventor of the Transparent Computing Facility, which was swallowed up by Platinum Technology Inc in 1995. He was also the manager of Unix development tools at Tandem Computers Inc, and the assistant vice president of technology at Unix International.
According to Illuminata, the replacement for both men is Bob Yellin, who joined Tivoli earlier this year to run the S/390 division. Yellin was in charge of product strategy at Legent Corp at the time it was acquired by Computer Associates International Inc in 1995 – an acquisition, points out Illuminata, that was prompted by Legent’s failure to make the transition from mainframes to distributed systems. He will report directly to Jan Lindelow, who took over from Tivoli founder Frank Moss at the end of 1997, and joined Tivoli from bar code transaction system company Symbol Technologies, where he was president and chief operating officer.
Illuminata marks the two resignations as the completion of IBM’s integration of Tivoli as a full division, rather than an independent start-up. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it says, but points out that the internet has changed the systems management landscape once again, and Tivoli’s new guard must see it though the changes. Tivoli was originally founded by three ex- IBMers keen to exploit distributed systems. IBM now has to make sure that history doesn’t repeat itself, and that Tivoli avoids the fate of NetView.
