BEA Loses Another Channel Chief

Former BEA Vice President of Business Development Morris Beton, who joined the company in September 2002, has left BEA to become CEO of Noetix, a Bellevue, Wash.-based business reporting software firm, a BEA spokesman told CRN.

In the interim, Charlie Ill, BEA's executive vice president of worldwide sales, will head up channel efforts started under Beton, the spokesman said. Ill joined BEA early this year after spending 24 years at IBM, most recently in the IBM Software Group.

Beton, along with BEA's current senior vice president of marketing, Mercedes Ellison, replaced former BEA Senior Vice President of Global Alliances Rauline Ochs at the helm of the company's channel strategy in September 2002.

Ochs--the key designer of BEA's Star Partner Program and the new, channel-friendly sales strategy the company rolled out in February 2001--left the company in April 2002.

Ochs recently resurfaced in the channel organization of BEA competitor Oracle, where she currently is working on Oracle's sales and channel efforts around its 10G software launch next week at OracleWorld, Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of Oracle server technology, told CRN Wednesday.

BEA's channel strategy has lagged and lost some definition since Ochs' departure, solution providers have said. In fact, company insiders told CRN that in recent months, Beton has been less than aggressive at plotting BEA's channel course going forward.

However, CRN previously reported that both Beton and Ellison, under the direction of BEA Chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang, were working to clarify and refine BEA's strategy to go to market with a strategic number of regional and global partners. What's more, they said BEA remains committed to partnering with solution providers to market and sell its software.

In other BEA executive news, BEA co-founder and former Chairman and CEO Bill Coleman left his position as BEA's chief customer advocate to take over a new software company, the spokesman said.

Coleman, who will remain as a BEA consultant and member of the company's board, is now at the helm of a startup in Silicon Valley with software "complementary to BEA's" technology, the spokesman said. Specific details about the company have yet to be disclosed, he said.