Former SUSE CEO Seibt Leaves Novell

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Novell has announced two executive changes that affect its Linux business in the past few days. On Friday, Ron Hovsepian, who has been president of Novell's North American unit, was named as executive vice president of the company and given full charge of all the presidents in charge of Novell's operating units. And on Monday, Richard Seibt, the who was brought into SUSE as its CEO prior to its sale to Novell two years ago and who had been named president of Novell's EMEA operations, submitted his resignation.

While it may look like these two events--Hovsepian's rise and Seibt's departure--are directly related, people familiar with the situation say that the two events are not exactly causally linked even though their timing was close. Novell's spokesperson, Bruce Lowry, was not willing to give any reasons for Seibt's departure, only to say that it was done through his own freewill and that he had submitted his letter of resignation to Novell's chairman and CEO, Jack Messman, and that Messman had accepted it. I contacted Seibt's office in Germany and was told that he was in conference calls all day to help Novell work through the changes that would result from his leaving the company.

Hovsepian is widely expected to eventually take the reins of Novell from Messman, the outside exec who was brought into Novell as chairman and CEO from Cambridge Technology Partners, an IT consulting firm located outside of Boston. (This is where Novell is now headquartered, and with the addition of SUSE and Ximian, Novell's corporate center of gravity has been shifting eastward since Messman took over.) Novell acquired Cambridge Technology in July 2001 for $266 million as a means of gaining some consulting businesses and to get Messman, who is now 63, as its top executive; he was president and CEO at Cambridge. The top spot at Novell opened up when Eric Schmidt jumped at the chance to become chairman of search engine juggernaut Google several years prior to its going public. Schmidt used to be chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems. It is unclear when Messman plans to retire from the CEO position, but clearly the company needs to get itself together for a clear line of succession. When Chris Stone, Novell's vice chairman and chief technology officer, left the company in November 2004 after moving Novell into the open source markets and spearheading the acquisition of Ximian and SUSE, this left a power vacuum. (Last month, Stone was named president and CEO of StreamServe, a company that peddles business communication management products.)

It is unclear if Seibt's resignation caused Hovsepian's appointment as president of worldwide field operations at Novell and executive vice president of the company, or if this was already in the works. My sources say that Seibt was not fired, but really did leave of his own accord, and indicated further that he was not jockeying for the top job at Novell. What can be said from the outside for sure is that both Seibt and Hovsepian seem qualified for the job.

Seibt got his start in information technology 27 years ago as a salesperson at IBM Germany, and eventually rose to become one of the managing directors of that unit of Big Blue; he was responsible for sales and marketing of software in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. He was eventually appointed as vice president of software sales and marketing for IBM's North American operations, and had responsibility for the OS/2 operating system as well as DB2 databases, Tivoli systems management products, Lotus groupware, and WebSphere middleware. He was eventually given the dubious job of managing the whole OS/2 operating system project, including development. In 1998, after leaving IBM, Seibt joined United Internet, and took its Adlink Internet Media subsidiary public. In January 2003, he was named CEO of SUSE, and a year later, Novell owned it and he was named president of Novell's European operations.

Hovsepian is also an ex-IBMer, and spent 17 years in various positions, including a stint as worldwide general manager of industry solutions for the retail and distribution industry sector. After leaving IBM a few years ago, Hovsepian worked at Internet Capital Group, a publicly traded investment company that bought up B2B and e-commerce companies as the dot-com boom was bursting and that has shrunk from $123.7 million in sales in 2001 to $52.4 million in sales in 2004 and which has had phenomenal losses $2.3 billion in 2001 and another $373.4 million in 2002, 2003, and 2004 combined. It comes as no surprise that Hovsepian, who is 44, jumped at the chance to join Novell in June 2003 as president of its North American operations. Messman, in making the announcement of Hovsepian's appointment, said that Hovsepian had demonstrated the ability to streamline Novell's operations, deliver solid financial results, and stay focused on the customer. Now, Hovsepian will be in charge of all of Novell's other presidents and will help them do the same.

Hovsepian has assumed Seibt's role in running Novell EMEA in the interim, and it is apparently up to his discretion as to whether or not Novell should name a replacement or let him take over the unit himself. With Novell's Linux business not growing as fast as the company would like and being quite a bit smaller than Red Hat's Linux business, Hovsepian has his work cut out for him. Novell bought SUSE to make money more than it did to make noise or friends. It has certainly done well in the latter two areas, but the making money part has been more problematic.