Piotr - some thoughts on Pesatori and the re-alignment just announced - posted this on the DELL thread also.
Pesatori was responsible for the PC division at Digital and left after a power struggle with "GQ Bob" Palmer. He then went to Tandem, where he was #2 under Roel Pieper. He was regarded as a strong operational manager who brought Tandem to profitability prior to the CPQ acquisition.
After CPQ acquired Tandem, Pesatori managed the transition, then took a corporate staff position (Corporate Marketing I think), and was in that relatively low-profile background position until the management shuffle when Pfeiffer left.
It may be that the fact that CPQ's enterprise group grew more slowly than SUNW, or that slow cost cutting affected financial performance, or that Wildfire was 18 months late, affected Pesatori's prospects at CPQ. But overall performance of the Enterprise group was strong under Pesatori, so I tend to discount those facts as reasons for Pesatori's departure.
Given that this departure is almost exactly 1 year from Pesatori's appointment as head of the enterprise group, I think another scenario is more likely. When Rosen sacked most of the senior management, he needed a strong operational manager to assure that CPQ's profit engine - which was enterprise, not PCs - continued to chug. And he happened to have a seasoned executive with a good operational record on staff, who had not been part of the discredited "A-team". CPQ needed the time to stem the losses in the PC business and do a careful re-alignment of other key business units, like services, groom some of the division heads (Industry Standard Servers, Business Critical Servers, and Storage Products as stated in the CPQ press release, perhaps others as well) for a larger role, while maintaining the overall enterprise business, which represents half of CPQ's revenue.
After more than 30 years in the business, much of it close to the top of some major companies, Pesatori surely does not need to prove himself or make more money. So I suspect that Pesatori, who after all is nearly 60 years old and has done nearly every job in the computer industry, agreed to manage the core enterprise business on an interim basis, with the understanding that he could get out on good terms after a year.
The re-alignment of the business units was too comprehensive to have been a quick response to departure of a senior executive - especially since Capellas had been hinting at this reworking of the business for months. So this may be a case of the press release actually reflecting what went on - Pesatori managed the transition and "took care of business" until other senior executives could focus on realigning the key enterprise divisions, then went off to do something fun. |
