[cobalt-users] Interesting reading while you wait for your Raq to reboot inbetween pkgs

["GPS" <gps@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Then and now.................

Bad career moves
Upside; Foster City; Oct 1999; Deborah Radcliff;

By age 24, STEPHEN DEWITT had opened up most of Canada for the Cupertino, Calif.-based utilities software provider Symantec Corp.
and won the heady position of general manager of Canadian operations. By age 27, he'd worked his way up to vice president of
marketing for all of Symantec.

He was a software marketing genius. But then he took a wrong turn.

"I was listening to John Chambers [president and CEO of Cisco Systems Inc. ], who was guest speaker at an executive training course
at Stanford University. He was talking about building marketing synergies and leverage points between very diverse business units,"
DeWitt says. "Maybe it was luck, maybe it was karma, but after that first encounter, I got a call from a recruiter conducting the
search for a new VP of marketing for Cisco."

Thus in January 1996, DeWitt, a software guy, moved to Cisco, a hardware company. "I went to Cisco because I wanted the challenge-I
wanted to put myself in a situation that was sink or swim," DeWitt explains.

DeWitt held two positions at Cisco over the next two years: vice president of enterprise marketing, then vice president and general
manager of the enterprise network management business unit. He totally bought into Chambers' message about developing a marketing
synergy that would weave together Cisco's multitude of diverse business units. And since Cisco was acquiring a heap of software
companies at the time, DeWitt saw software as the missing link.

Problem was, not many at Cisco shared his point of view.

In fact, the techie types from the hardware units tried to intimidate him with technical language that DeWitt didn't know or care to
understand. The escalating friction made it difficult for DeWitt to truly lead, according to one Cisco employee who asked to remain
anonymous. "His inability to execute was holding him back here," the employee says.

True, DeWitt had trouble tuning his language to suit the highly technical business managers. But he also had trouble tuning into the
technical customer.

"Cisco's early customer base was very technical-- they were all about feeds and speeds. But who really cares why a network closet
wire switch should be connected to a particular router?" DeWitt says, his voice rising with excitement. "I wanted to talk about the
overall value proposition to the customer."

Not only was DeWitt in over his head technically, he also found that Cisco managers "were purposely being arrogant to establish a
one-up position," he says. They didn't take him seriously because he came from a consumer background instead of an enterprise
marketing background.

"I think the Cisco culture was a learning place for Steve," says Techfarm's Campbell. Campbell is also chairman of Cobalt Networks
Inc., a maker of Web server appliances where DeWitt is now president and CEO.

At Cisco, DeWitt learned his hardest lesson: You can't force change in a company that's not ready. "That was early in the Cisco
culture. I think they've made huge strides toward my model of the customer application since then," he says. "Some people excel in
[acrimonious] environments like that. And some don't."
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Running the rack
Telephony; Chicago; Jan 22, 2001; Tim McElligott;

Volume:  240
Issue:  4
Start Page:  32
ISSN:  00402656
Full Text:
Copyright PRIMEDIA Intertec Jan 22, 2001

Sun chalks up and aims at low-end server market


As rolling power outages swept through California last week, Sun Microsystems announced a power play in the low-end appliance server
space with two new product lines aimed at a broadly defined service provider market.

ISPs, application service providers and corporate IT departments that act as service providers by providing their own internal
services are the targets of Sues new rack-mountable PC servers.

Sun wasted little time integrating technology acquired from Cobalt Networks last month into its new server strategy. The new product
lines consist of a family of Sun Cobalt appliance servers and an extension of Sun's Netra line of thin servers.

In what Stephen DeWitt, vice president and general manager for server appliances at Sun, called his acquired company's coming out
party, Sun introduced the Sun Cobalt RaQ XTR appliance for Web and application hosting and the CacheRaQ 4 appliance server for
caching and content storage.

"Make no mistake about it: What we are announcing today is a critical shift in the horizontal scale side of server infrastructure,"
DeWitt said.

Appliances will not cannibalize the traditional network server model but will bring in a new era of platform technologies, he said.

"It's who can drive the biggest set of services at the lowest price point to the broadest class of customers," DeWitt said. "That's
the name of the game in the service provider space, and that's what we are focused on."

Sun is pricing its Netra Xl server just under $1000. With 128 Mb/s of memory, an UltraSparc Ile 400 MHz processor, 20 Gb/s hard
drive and a pre-installed Solaris 8 Operating Environment, the Netra XI can be used for e-mail, messaging, Web hosting or domain
name services. The XI will be available beginning March 6.

Sun also introduced the next generation of Netra T1 thin servers. The Netra T1 is Sun's best-selling rackmountable thin server and
starts at $2995 for 18 Gb/s of hard drive space, 256 Mb/s of memory and a 500 MHz processor.

"The new [product] lines provide a one-two punch that we think will generate huge growth in expanding our market into the lowlevel
appliance business," said John McFarlane, executive vice president of Sun's network service provider group. "If the Dells and
Compaqs and HPs think they are having problems selling PCs... watch out. We are really going to be after this market."

Next quarter, Hewlett-Packard expects to announce a series of server appliances that will include Web caching, Web hosting,
load-balancing, secure sockets layer and extensible markup language acceleration and virtual private networking and management.

"[As] the first OEM to announce a working relationship with Intel's server appliance business unit, HP believes its extensive
experience in the server market, combined with the high performance and versatility of Intel's NetStructure appliances, means HP
will be able to offer customers best-in-class solutions to meet their business challenges" said HP in a written response to Sun's
announcements.