Top Solaris Marketeers Exit Sun, Stage Left

Published: March 8, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems has confirmed rumors that its two top marketeers for the Solaris operating system have both decided to leave the company.

Tom Goguen, vice president of Solaris marketing, and Chris Ratcliffe, director of Solaris marketing, have both decided to leave. According to a statement from Sun, Goguen is leaving sun for "personal and family reasons," and it is never possible to figure out if this is really true or not. Sun did, however, say nice things about Goguen, which may indicate that the reasons really are personal. And considering Goguen's history, he may boomerang back.

"Since rejoining Sun in 2004, Tom has made significant contributions to the Solaris organization, and has led the Solaris team through the completion of recent milestones including Sun's agreement with Intel and the Solaris 10 11/06 update. Sun would like to recognize Tom for his strategic leadership of the Solaris business as well as his operation of the many rigorous product management functions that were involved. Tom is committed to leading the Solaris team through early March as we finalize the search to identify his successor, as well as add to the Solaris team to help continue Sun's achievements in this world of partner opportunities. While it is always sad to see an employee of Tom's caliber depart, we wish him well as he begins a new chapter in his life."

Goguen returned to Sun just as the company was ramping up for its Solaris 10 launch a little more than two years ago. Goguen was formerly Solaris product group manager, and he came back to evangelize Solaris in the top marketing spot. Goguen left Sun in the late 1990s to work for an Internet startup called Eazel, which was founded by the creators of the Macintosh interface at Apple Computer, and Eazel was attempting to make the Gnome interface for Linux more like the Mac. Eazel went bust in May 2001, and everybody, including Goguen, went to work for Apple as part of its Mac OS X efforts and expansion into the server market. Exactly where he is going now is unclear.

Sun was a whole lot less precise about Ratcliffe, who as the director of Solaris marketing, was the person who did most of the interfacing with analysts and journalists who follow operating systems. All that Sun said was that Ratcliffe "has left Sun to pursue other interests."

There is no indication of this and it is very unlikely, but it would be interesting to see these two spearhead the development of an alternative to the Solaris Unix distribution from Sun. Now that Solaris is open source, this is certainly a possibility. Since Polaris is already taken as a product name for the project that is porting Solaris to IBM's Power processors, such a clone Solaris might be called Molaris. They could get Cindy Crawford to be their spokesperson--or Eva Mendez, or maybe even a cyber version of Marilyn Monroe. For the HPC version of the operating system, they could use Avogadro instead and always be at release number 6.02, which might make the nerds chuckle. And just to confuse everyone, it could have as its mascot the American Shrew Mole, which is neither a shrew nor a mole but a little of both.

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