Sybase COOs Over Company Recovery

Vendor pledges to appoint chief operating officer as part of strategy to improve turnover

Mitchell Kertzmann, Sybase CEO, is adamant that the company has turned the corner and is moving into its second phase of recovery by focusing on increasing its revenues.

As part of its recovery, Sybase plans to fill the recently created position of chief operating officer. The COO will oversee the company?s four product teams, which cover development tools, workplace database, enterprise database and the wired unit.

Whoever is appointed will also act as a partial replacement for David Litwack, former chief technology officer, who left Sybase to join internet startup company Silverstream.

Kertzmann said: ?Our next goal is to increase licence growth. You can?t just be a cost-cutting company. We have to grow, especially in our server database licences, or our shares won?t reflect our value.

?Databases are a strategic sell, they?re a key foundation in a customer?s IT strategy, while tools are a tactical sell, so our revenue growth will come from new products like Adaptive Server. But we?ve done all we said we?d do so far, and we expect to see turnover grow again in the second half of this year.?

But he added that the database industry was changing. ?In effect, there is no database industry. The battleground has become broader and is now below the operating system and above the database. One of the challenges for Sybase is to prove there?s room in the middle bit for us.?

He said Sybase was unlikely to buy an applications supplier to move into the market, but would continue its strategy of partnering. Sybase could not afford to spend years and millions of dollars struggling to make itself successful in the applications business.