Is Zander, Sun's President and COO, Next To Go? Unlikely
(that was assumed ... until yesterday :-)
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Computergram International
Date: May 1, 2002
Number: 4407
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
It seems like a ludicrous suggestion, but analysts at Merrill Lynch, who brought out president and COO of Sun Microsystems Inc, Ed Zander, to speak at its Hardware Heaven conference this week, said in a research note published yesterday that Zander declined to comment on his long-term plans for staying at Sun and even suggested that he would retire or jump ship to another company within 12 to 18 months. There does seem to be a fair amount of musical chairs going on in the Sun executive suite, however, and it has made people on the outside a little crazy.
Sun without the prickly Zander is, as many have said when pondering this very idea this week, like Microsoft Corp without boisterous Steve Ballmer, who has recently been elevated to the position of CEO at Microsoft. (That's a strong hint, people.)
While Zander has been fast and loose with some of the things he has said in the past few years as Sun has grown powerful and come under closer scrutiny - something that does not even make him exceptional among the top brass at any IT company - the board of directors of Sun would have to be absolute idiots to even think of letting Zander simply walk away from the company that he helped build into a respectable and feared contender in the workstation, server, and software markets. The fact that current Sun chairman and CEO, Scott McNealy, has deflected questions about the recent defections at Sun, and has particularly said nothing about Zander, says nothing at all about what may or may not be going on inside Sun. McNealy may be just as likely to be thinking about relinquishing the CEO title to Zander, and that has set of a whole slew of retirements among executives who are just plain tired of the fight or who do not want Zander coming down on their necks every day.
John Shoemaker, the executive vice president of Sun's Computer Products Group who also managed Sun's manufacturing operations, quality control, and alliances, is 59 and retiring from Sun on July 1 after putting in 10 years at Sun. Sun's CFO, Michael Lehman, announced late last week that he would leave at the same time as Shoemaker after putting in 15 years at Sun. Lehman is only 51 years old and is unlikely to retire permanently from professional life unless there are mitigating circumstances (like a family illness or some such). Both executives have promised to stay on as part-time consultants to train the next generation of Sun executives.
Late last week, Sun announced that Larry Hambly, who is 55 and the executive vice president of Sun's Enterprise Services unit, would retire from Sun on July 1 as well and would help the new executive in charge of the unit, Patricia Sueltz, 49, who has been running Sun's software business and who jumped ship from IBM as its Java czar two years ago to take that top job. Yesterday, Sun announced that Jonathan Schwartz, who is a mere pup at 36, has been named executive vice president of the newly created Software division of Sun, which unifies its Solaris operating system, Java, and Sun ONE middleware offerings into a single unit. Mark Tolliver, who is 50 and used to run Sun's iPlanet partnership with AOL Time Warner, has been tapped as executive vice president of Sun's new Marketing and Business Development organization. Tolliver now has the additional title of chief strategy officer. These positions are effective as of July 1.
While it seems unlikely that Zander would not be tapped to be CEO of Sun given the substantial brain drain that the company has absorbed, it is just remotely possible that all of these changes are due to the fact that Zander, who is 55, has decided to move on. (Maybe he wants to run Hewlett Packard Co if a job opens up?) Zander came to Sun from Apollo Computer in 1987, the company that Hewlett Packard acquired several years later to launch itself against Sun in the Unix workstation business. He worked at Apollo for five years after spending nine years at server vendor Data General (subsumed into the gaping maw of EMC Corp never to be heard from again). Zander's talents are in short supply, but the question is whether or not he could live in any other environment other than Sun, particularly given his allergies to Microsoft, Intel, and IBM. If IBM could hire him away as president or CEO as IBM CEO and president Sam Palmisano moves up to the chairmanship of Big Blue later this year, it would be one of the funniest and strangest events in IT history. It would take a mountain of stock options about the size of the pyramids in IBM's Somers, New York marketing headquarters. Nothing has ever happened that would be stranger than Zander jumping to IBM, with the exception of the suggestion that he might quit Sun.
One more thing: What on earth is Hardware Heaven? Where old mainframes and PCs go to die? If you are watching the server business, this is more like Hardware Hell, or at best, Hardware Purgatory. |
