Surprise moves at Inprise -- Yocam, CFO quits By Clare Haney InfoWorld Electric Posted at 10:17 AM PT, Apr 1, 1999 Del Yocam, Inprise's chairman and CEO, has suddenly resigned along with Chief Financial Officer and Vice President Kathleen Fisher, the software company announced late Wednesday. To steer the now rudderless Inprise, a management committee has been formed, Inprise said in a statement issued Wednesday. Members of the management committee which will report to Inprise's board of directors include the presidents of the company's two divisions -- James Weil of the Inprise division and John Floisand of the Borland.com division. Jay Leite, previously Inprise's vice president of business development, now takes on the role of interim company CFO. The news comes out of the blue. Yocam was bought on board in late 1996 when the tools vendor was known as Borland International to try and stem its serious financial problems which led to the company regularly bleeding plenty of red ink. He took over from Borland's flamboyant founder Philippe Kahn who left to establish Starfish Software which is now owned by Motorola. Yocam was formerly at Apple and Tektronix and is widely credited with helping to turn both companies' respective operations around. Once in the saddle at Borland, Yocam embarked on a series of restructuring exercises, all of which were designed to reinvent the company to focus its attentions on enterprise-level customers, not Borland's traditional core user base of developers and desktop end-users. Under his leadership, Borland was renamed Inprise in April of last year. The most radical of Yocam's restructuring efforts occurred in late January of this year. Inprise was effectively split into two operations -- Inprise, based in San Mateo, Calif., focusing on enterprise software and Borland.com, based in Scotts Valley, Calif., acting as a Web tools and services vendor for both itself and third-party companies. At the same time, Inprise also announced plans to cut its global workforce of around 950 staff by 20 percent and declared fiscal 1998 earnings for the year ended Dec. 31, 1998, of $8.3 million on revenues of $189.1 million. Such refocusing appeared to be paying off when Oracle substantially upped its commitment to Inprise technology in February of this year. The database giant signed a multimillion dollar licensing deal centered around Inprise's VisiBroker object request broker technology. Inprise acquired VisiBroker when it purchased Visigenic Software in November 1997 for $150 million. At least one analyst did not interpret Inprise's high-level personnel departures as a telltale indicator of company doom. "There's a lot of value in Inprise right now -- certainly from a technical standpoint," said Eric Brown, an industry analyst at Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Mass. "My sense is that, to date, Inprise's strategy has been to get out of the [Visual Basic] market, and into the distributed applications and platforms space. They've paid much more than lip service to that vision. The overall organization, to whatever extent Del Yocam was involved, saved itself from a perilous downward spiral that resulted from an effort to make the fat client model work." "But, they've entered into a marketplace that is going to be significantly influenced by the gorillas of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc.," Brown added. "There are two realistic futures for a company like Inprise -- to try to be a free-standing force, or to find the right dance partner. And there are few Cinderella success stories in the market." Among potential suitors for Inprise, Sun seems the most compatible, according to Brown. Inprise Corp., in Scotts Valley, Calif., can be reached at www.inprise.com. Clare Haney is Asia-Pacific bureau chief for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate. InfoWorld's Boston bureau chief Ted Smalley Bowen contributed to this story.