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Youngjohns Leaves Sun to Become CEO of Callidus

Robert Youngjohns, the top salesperson at Sun Microsystems for several years, has taken a job as president and CEO of Callidus Software, a maker of compensation and incentive management software that is based in San Jose. Youngjohns was most recently the executive vice president of strategic development; he also ran Sun's financing unit. He joined Sun in 1995, and eventually ran the company's United Kingdom unit, then its European operations. Prior to that, he worked at IBM in a variety of engineering and management jobs. Youngjohns starts at Callidus on May 31. Callidus was founded in 1996, and its TrueComp software is noteworthy in that it runs on a grid computing architecture. Callidus had a pretty good 2003, with $71.7 million in sales and a modest profit, but in 2004 sales declined to $58.7 million and it booked a $25.5 million loss. Last summer, Callidus missed its guidance to Wall Street and ousted its president, CEO, and chairman, Reed Taussig, and began looking for a new president and CEO.

Stuart Wells, who is Sun's top executive for the Wall Street area, takes over Youngjohns' posts as the head of strategic development and the executive in charge of Sun Financing.

Sybase to Certify Database, Tools on Solaris 10

Database maker Sybase and server maker Sun Microsystems announced this week that Sybase will support its databases and related tools running on Solaris 10 on the X64 platform. Specifically, Sun and Sybase engineers will port Sybase's Adaptive Server Enterprise database, its Sybase IQ data warehousing, and SQL Anywhere Studio data management tools, its Replication Server, and its Open Client Server to Solaris 10 on 64-bit Xeon and 64-bit Opteron platforms. The products are expected to be delivered some time in the fourth quarter.

Sun to Boost Hiring Offshore for Engineers

In a sign of the times and of the increasing pressure for the company to make some money, Sun Microsystems said last week that it would hire around 1,000 engineers in Bangalore, India over the next two to three years, and that it would also expand its engineering centers in Beijing, China, St Petersburg, Russia, and Prague, Czech Republic. According to a report in Reuters, Stephen Pelletier, the senior vice president in charge of engineering for Sun, said in a press conference in Bangalore said that the expansion in these areas was about participating in fast-growing IT markets, but we all know that while this is true, it is equally true that it costs less money to do software engineering in China and India than it does back in the States. Sun currently has 1,000 engineers in Bangalore and 500 in Beijing, according to the Reuters report.

Intrado Ports 911 System to HP Integrities

Intrado, a provider of 911 telecom software systems for cities and municipalities based in Longmont, Colorado, is one of the pioneers of 911 systems. It has been building such software for cities since 1979, and most recently, it has been doing so on many of the platforms that ultimately ended up underneath the Hewlett-Packard logo: Tandem NonStop fault-tolerant servers, Digital AlphaServers running Tru64 Unix, and HP 9000 systems running HP-UX. The 911 platform, which is called the Intelligent Emergency Network, has been extended in the past two decades as new technologies come along, most recently with wireless computers that are common in emergency services. Last week, the Intrado announced that it has ported its software to run on the HP-UX environment on HP's Itanium-based Integrity line of servers, which provides AlphaServer and HP 9000 customers using prior 911 software packages a common upgrade path to the latest Intrado software and HP server platform.

Absoft Rolls Out Fortran 9.2 for Apple's Tiger OS X

Absoft, a Fortran compiler maker for the Mac platform, has announced that its Pro Fortran 9.2 compiler suite is ready for the new Mac OS X V10.4 operating system, code-named "Tiger." Apple is beginning to get a toehold in the high performance computing market thanks to its adoption of fast 64-bit Power processors from IBM and the FreeBSD underpinnings of the Mac OS X platform. The Absoft Fortran compiler can take full advantage of the 64-bit Tiger/Power environment, and the tools will still run on the prior OS X "Panther" V10.3 release. The Fortran 9.2 compiler for Mac OS X will start shipping on May 15. Absoft, which is based in Rochester Hills, Michigan, also offers Fortran compilers for 32-bit Windows X86 platforms and for Linux running on 32-bit X86, 64-bit X64, 32-bit Power, and 64-bit Power machines.

BEA Attempts to Quantify and Qualify IT's Acceptance of Service-Oriented Architectures

So, what do you think about service-oriented architectures? Not sure? Think it sounds like a good idea for building more flexible applications, but are a little unsure about exactly what people mean when they say SOA? Join the club, because according to a new survey of 1,000 C-level managers, IT managers, and programmers by middleware software maker BEA Systems, you are in good company.

BEA said that about the same number of C-level executives spent time on the survey as IT managers, which the company believes is indicative of the fact that C-level execs understand that SOA is an important evolution in application development that can make their companies more resilient by making their IT systems and applications more flexible. About 44 percent of those surveyed (across all titles) said that they were familiar with SOA, and on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 meant you have the basic concepts of SOA and 4 meant you were already an advanced adherent to this approach of developing software as a mesh of services, not as monolithic application, the average response was 1.76. Some 90 percent of those taking the survey understood that SOA was about improving the level of service that IT delivers to end users, customers, and partners and that done properly it could result in lower costs, the re-use of application components, and better integration of applications.

Interestingly, about 29 percent of those who did the survey identified themselves as SOA architects, which is a hybrid of a business analyst, an application developer, and a system analyst.

World Community Grid Reaches 100,000 Devices

The World Community Grid (WCG) grid computing initiative started by IBM last November has added 100,000 PCs, workstations, and servers. IBM says thus far more than 64,000 people have donated over 8,250 years of aggregated runtime to the grid, which is being made available to the Human Proteome Folding Project, a kicker to the Human Genome Project that is trying to understand the mechanisms by which proteins fold and unfold themselves in our cells as they do the things that keep us alive or, if they don't work properly, kill us with diseases. Marist College, a liberal arts school located in IBM's Poughkeepsie, N.Y., stomping grounds, has donated the processing capacity of its 7,000 PCs and laptops to the WCG project. Marist is also where Linux on the mainframe was created, incidentally, and despite its self-proclaimed liberal arts bent, Marist offers bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science. IBM Pokie is where Big Blue has designed and manufactured mainframes since there were mainframes.