Andy Bechtolsheim, Senior Vice President, Chief Architect, Sun

By Joseph F. Kovar, ChannelWeb

9:00 AM EST Mon. Nov. 13, 2006
From the November 13, 2006 issue of CRN

2006 TOP 25: 1-5 | 6-10 | 11-15 | 16-20 | 21-25

In the 1990s, a brash outsider named Lou Gerstner came in as IBM chairman and saved the company. At Hewlett-Packard, it was the hiring of outsider Mark Hurd as CEO that brought the company back into focus. In the case of Sun Microsystems, however, it was the return of employee No. 1—and an engineer to boot—who is getting credit for helping breathe new life into the company.

Andy Bechtolsheim, one of Sun's co-founders, is still employee No. 1, although he left in 1995 to found two other startups, including Kealia, a maker of video servers. When Sun acquired Kealia in 2004, it also got Bechtolsheim's services as senior vice president and chief architect. The acquisition and Bechtolsheim's technical leadership went a long way toward reinvigorating Sun's server and storage business, if not its profitability. Sales rose 17 percent to $3.19 billion for the quarter ended Oct. 1, while losses narrowed. Research firms IDC and Gartner both report that Sun is the fastest-growing server vendor.

Solution providers attribute much of that to Sun's AMD Opteron-based line of Galaxy servers, which stem from the acquisition. "Andy will go down as the best industrial designer in the century," says Mark Teter, CTO of Advanced Systems Group, Denver. "Everyone has the utmost respect for his engineering and design capabilities. He's responsible for Sun becoming the best vendor in the x86 space."

At age 50, Bechtolsheim has not lost his engineering touch, his slight German accent or his work ethic. His vacation home in Big Sur, Calif., wasn't complete until he got satellite reception so he could slog through e-mail.

Ironically, Bechtolsheim had suggested Sun build an x86 product before he left the company 10 years ago to build Gigabit Ethernet switches at a startup that was later acquired by Cisco Systems. The suggestion didn't get far because Sun's Sparc servers were going strong. By 2003, Sun, Santa Clara, Calif., had unveiled a lackluster line of Opteron servers in a futile attempt to stem failing server revenue and a defection of customers from its Solaris operating system. But the me-too knockoffs didn't bring the kind of elegant design optimization that Bechtolsheim and his partner, David Cheriton, brought to Kealia. After several meetings with his friends at Sun, the deal was struck.

While Sun isn't just about servers, partners say the Galaxy line has for the first time in a long while brought new customers. "We've acquired so many new customers to Sun because of the Galaxy line," says Rob Wolfe, president and CEO of AvcomEast, Silver Spring, Md. "And it's opened the door to bringing them other Sun hardware and software. And as a Sun-only VAR, it's opened the door for us to other operating systems as well."

Ed Gogol, director of enterprise systems at Solarcom, a Norcross, Ga.-based Sun partner, said it was refreshing to see Bechtolsheim return. "There's still a lot of loyalty around the Sun brand," he says. "If Bechtolsheim is serious enough about Sun to come back, it says a lot about the company."

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