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To: Jim McMannis who wrote (86577)	8/3/1999 11:13:00 PM
From: L. Adam Latham	Respond to of 186894

Jim and all: dailynews.yahoo.com Sun Microsystems Software Unit Pres Resigning SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW - news) said Tuesday that Alan Baratz, the president of its recently-created software division, is resigning to take a position at Warburg Pincus & Co., an investment firm. Baratz, who was just promoted to head the company's software business in May, was also the key executive in charge of commercializing Sun's Java programming language. Baratz will join E.M. Warburg, Pincus & Co. LLC, an affiliate of the investment firm, as a managing director, and will become a member of the company's Information Technology team, where he will scout for new technology investments and work with their technology companies. Baratz was for three years the president of Java Software, overseeing Sun's efforts to extend Sun's Java programming language into wider use. Last month, he became the head of Sun's new software division, into which Sun folded all of its software products, after an announcement in May. Java, which was first developed in 1995, is a programming language that developers can use to write an application once that will run on many kinds of computers. Indeed, Java has become more pervasive, especially in the corporate computing environment. At the company's recent JavaOne developers' conference in June, Sun touted Java running on a range of devices, from 3Com Corp.'s PalmPilot handheld computers to cell phones to large corporate servers. Sun said Jon Kannegaard, vice president of Sun's Java Platform business, will assume the role of acting division president, reporting to Sun president and chief operating officer Ed Zander. Sun said it will begin an immediate search for a replacement. Baratz will remain at Sun until mid-August. ''This is something he (Baratz) wanted to do for a long time,'' said a Sun spokeswoman. ''We are doing a full search. We are looking at all possibilities,'' she said, when asked if Sun would keep the search inside the company or include executives from outside. Baratz was not available for comment. Warburg, Pincus invested approximately $1 billion in 1998 in information technology companies, including two software companies with a focus on Java, EarthWeb Inc. (Nasdaq:EWBX - news) and BEA Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:BEAS - news) . Other investments included Level One Communications Inc. (Nasdaq:LEVL - news), which is being acquired by Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news) and Covad Communications Group Inc. . Analysts said given the difficulty finding key executives in Silicon Valley, Sun may find it difficult to replace Baratz, although they also said there are several executives within Sun who could step into his place, including Kannegaard. ''The person not only needs to know the business angles, how to drive the product into the market, they need to know the vision behind the whole thing and to understand the technology to know where the new opportunities are,'' said Tim Sloane, an analyst at Aberdeen Group in Boston. ''That's a big challenge.'' Sloane said that one possible external candidate in his view could be Pat Sueltz, who is the general manager of Java at International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news). A spokeswoman for IBM declined to comment on speculation. ''We wish Alan good luck in his new endeavor, Sueltz said in a statement. ''Java's momentum continues. It's well on its way to becoming a de facto standard for building e-business applications. We will continue to work with Sun and other industry leaders to ensure that Java evolves to meet the needs of our customers.'' Shares of Sun, which rose Monday following the announcement of a new chip family in development for the information appliance market, closed up $1.9375 to $71.375 in Nasdaq trading.