News

posted on 25 March 2008 09:06

It's been a long time coming but Sun's David Yen, at one time part of the StorageTek makeover, and then transferred sideways/promoted to head Sun's microelectronics business, has jumped ship for networking company Juniper.

It seems Sun's microelectronics initiatives are paying fruit, with multi-core SPARC processors and yesterday's DARPA award for processors interconnected by light beams.

Yet EVP Yen has walked, and to an undiclosed role. We'll hear exactly what the role is in mid-April.

His time looking after Sun's Storage business, starting in May 2006, was apparently miserable, with rumours that he was going to leave and take up a teaching post. Well, he did leave - the Storage business in Sun that is - and was chosen by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz to head its Microelectronics business a year ago almost to the day.

Long-term StorageTek veteran Jon Benson who had reported to him, was given the lead role in the Storage business. A few months later the systems storage products were transferred out of that business unit and poured into John Fowler's Systems business at Sun. The tape automation products, plus other legacy Storage Tek products remained with Benson.

Then Benson's reporting line was switched from Schwartz to Fowler, which looked like a demotion. However Fowler said he himself had suggested the change to Schwartz.

The Microelectronics business at Sun had a responsibility to find customers for Sun's chips outside Sun itself. There were a few, such as Marvell Electronics for multi-threaded Ethernet technology, but there have been no large-scale customer wins. Perhaps Yen had a unphill sales battle against the marketing onslaught of commodity x86 chips from Intel and AMD.

It certainly looks as if Yen had not settled, with just ten months in Storage, then 12 months in Microelectronics, followed by an exit from Sun altogether. What we might conclude is that the central business unit at Sun is John Fowler's Systems business. Everything else is, relatively speaking, peripheral to it. For ambitious people the road to Sun king heaven is via the Systems unit only. All other roads, for such people, may lead out of Sun altogether.

Sun has appointed Mark Spain as interim head of the Microelectronics group.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor,]}