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Editorials and Opinions
EDITORIAL
New Kids on the Block
December 15, 2004 –
Cassatt is a name to watch. Named for an Impressionist artist, Cassatt is the brainchild of Bill Coleman, the first chief executive of BEA Systems Inc., and the year-old San Jose start-up boasts a stellar lineup of talent from Sun, Oracle and other firms. This month, the company will be releasing its first product, Collage, which seeks to let companies better manage distributed systems. The design of Collage could have profound implications for the way multitiered enterprise applications are designed, developed and deployed.
But what’s equally interesting about Cassatt is what it represents: a return to the venture-funded Silicon Valley start-up mentality that some analysts had written off as a relic of the dot-com era. It also represents the destination for some of the valley’s recent brain drain, namely Sun’s Rich Green and Rob Gingell, who have chosen Cassatt, not Sun, home of “the network is the computer,” as the place to launch their latest networking-centric innovations.
As the post-bubble economy begins to settle down, the landscape of Silicon Valley’s platform makers is changing. That’s good.
Coleman, whose job at BEA had been redefined as chief customer advocate, left that company in late 2003—and many other executives, including CTO Scott Dietzen, followed him out the door this year. HP has seen significant departures from its executive wing. And there’s plenty of other talent on the street, looking for opportunities.
Meanwhile, some longtime second-tier players, such as Advanced Micro Devices, are out-innovating industry giants like Intel at a rate few would have believed possible only a short time ago.
This not only shows that the big leaders are vulnerable, but also reminds everyone, including venture capitalists, that smaller companies and start-ups often invent the next technology revolution.
It was Netscape, not Microsoft, that popularized the Internet. It was start-ups eBay and Amazon.com, not established retailers like Sears or Wal-Mart, that generated a business out of e-commerce. Technology neophytes at Google and Yahoo, not established IT-centric database companies like IBM or Oracle, found a way of making the huge information within the Web accessible—and profitable. Salesforce.com, not SAP, Siebel or Peoplesoft, took CRM to the Web.
Will Cassatt make a difference, and turn into the next Google or Salesforce.com? While the company bears watching, it’s too early to tell. Far too early. A strong pedigree is important, but as Marc Andreeson’s LoudCloud (now called Opsware) demonstrated, it’s not enough to guarantee overnight success. A year or two from now, Cassatt might go public for billions of dollars, or it might be offered up by desperate investors for pennies. Or it might go bust, and Coleman, Green and Gingell might be back on the street.
As we prepare to move into 2005, perhaps the flight of talent from companies like BEA and Sun, the rise of firms like AMD, and the tentative success of newbies like Cassatt are the best indications yet that the economy has turned around. While it’s possible that Silicon Valley won’t always have a central place in software development and the Internet, its health is still a leading indictor for our industry.
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