2005 Outlook and 20 To Watch: 5 People

JONATHAN SCHWARTZ, SUN

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Jonathan Schwartz should be getting accustomed to the limelight. In the past three years, the young executive has moved from a background position at Sun Microsystems into the line of fire, first as the leader to restore order to Sun’s software strategy in 2002, then to his current role as president and COO.

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Since his appointment April 2, Schwartz, 38, has become the chief talking head of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor. Schwartz is the evangelist for driving Solaris 10 Unix sales on volume systems, and he is leading the charge to take back market share in vertical markets such as financial services. His efforts are producing results: In late December, Sun said that 54 percent of its revenue came through the channel in its fiscal year, ended June 30.

Schwartz is also the target for any criticism leveled at Sun. Both Wall Street and Sun’s partners are increasingly impatient with the systems company’s struggle to maintain revenue growth and roll with the punches since the dot-com bust.
“Everything is resting on this,” said John Varel, chairman and CEO of FusionStorm, a Sun VAR and MSP partner in San Francisco. “This is Jonathan’s call. He is making some very definitive statements on which Sun must execute.”

ED ZANDER, MOTOROLA
What, exactly, does Motorola Chairman and CEO Ed Zander have up his sleeve?

Since joining the mobile communications giant early in 2004, the 57-year-old former Sun president and COO has overhauled Motorola’s compensation structure, tying bonuses to the company’s broad performance rather than to individual divisions. Externally, Zander has placed deeper bets on wireless broadband and VoIP infrastructure as demonstrated by the pending acquisition of MeshNetworks, slated to close last week. And he engineered a December reorganization into four business units to support Motorola’s corporate “seamless mobility” strategy.

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Of keen interest to solution providers should be Motorola Networks, which includes cellular access network operations, embedded communications and computing platforms, and a new 802.xx mobile broadband group; and Connected Home, which is planning new products for residential broadband customers.

Considering that Motorola focuses its partnership efforts for these areas on an ability to provide full-fledged solutions, wireless systems integrators or embedded solution providers just may find Zander’s company worth a second look.

CHARLES PHILIPS, ORACLE
There are several good reasons to keep an eye on Charles Phillips, co-president of Oracle. For one, there is the PeopleSoft acquisition. For another, he’s a very public No. 2 guy at a company not known for being kind to No. 2 guys.

Phillips, 45, was a star software analyst at Morgan Stanley before joining Oracle in May 2003 as an executive vice president. That was a month before CEO Larry Ellison embarked on his PeopleSoft quest and seven months before Ellison named Phillips co-president, along with Safra Catz. While the buyout was motivated by Ellison’s desire to broaden the database giant’s footprint in a consolidating market, Phillips was clearly on board and, for better or worse, emerged as Ellison’s heir apparent.

Some partners say that’s for better because it is a position of power at a company that can provide a counterweight to Microsoft, IBM and SAP. “Phillips is a true visionary in this industry and, from a complete 360-degree viewpoint, really understands what Oracle needs to do to take their business to the next level,” said Ron Zapar, CEO of Re-Quest, a longtime Oracle partner in Chicago.

But it may also be for worse because Ellison has a history of grooming top-notch successors and then discarding them. “The good news is that Chuck Phillips is the new No. 2 guy,” said another longtime partner. “What worries me is that Chuck Phillips is the No. 2 guy.”

GREG STEIN, APACHE
As the star developer of the Apache Web server and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, Greg Stein, like the Apache License, has deep roots in both the open-source world and the commercial realm.

Stein, 37, served at Oracle and sold Microsoft its first Web server but it was his implementation of the WebDAV IETF standard in 1998 that brought him fame and enabled the HTTP Web server to soar to the top. According to Netcraft, more than 67 percent of all Web sites use Apache today.

Next up for the Apache community is a Java relational database, code-named Darby and donated by IBM, and a J2EE-compliant app server, both expected to be approved in early 2005. That could make Stein and the Apache Foundation an even more influential force in the market. Apache code is free, and Stein’s generous philosophy is paying off big dividends for business. “The Apache License is more business-friendly; the GPL [General Public License] is scary for businesses,” said Stein, now an engineering manager at Google. “We’re charity. We’re trying to give people software they can use for their businesses.”

With a relational database and an app server thrown into the mix, Stein has yet more seeds to sow in the year ahead.

MARTY SEYER, AMD
To track the acceptance of dual-core processors, keep an eye on Marty Seyer. The 50-year-old is corporate vice president and general manager of Advanced Micro Devices’ Computation Products Group, the unit in charge of the development and launch of AMD’s dual-core processors. “We designed Opteron from the get-go to be able to support dual-core,” Seyer said. “The system builders are going to find when they design systems based on our recommendations, their upgrade path [will be] simple.”

In the race with Intel to win market share, Seyer’s previous work building up AMD’s presence and ecosystem in the custom-systems channel should be a plus. Edy Bedoya, president of EBC Computers, a Salt Lake City-based system builder, said he expects this year’s dual-core rollout to be significant and echoed Seyer’s confidence in AMD’s ability to execute. “We are hoping for a big boom like Windows 98 used to be,” Bedoya said.