BEA Promotes Co-Founder To CEO

E-business infrastructure software maker BEA Systems, Inc. Tuesday promoted its co-founder Alfred Chuang to CEO.

Chuang is replacing his friend and BEA co-founder and chief strategy officer Bill Coleman who will stay with the company to take part in strategic decisions for the company in cooperation with the board and executive management team. Coleman will focus on building relationships with BEA customers and employees.

“Every few years BEA has gone through successful, strategic transformations to better align itself for market and industry advantage,” says Coleman. “The best example of this is when Alfred led BEA’s transformation after our 1998 acquisition of WebLogic, which resulted in BEA becoming the market leader for application servers. The time is right for Alfred to lead us through the next phase of the company’s evolution. Together, Alfred and I have met many of the milestones we set forth when we founded BEA, including being the fastest software company to reach $1 billion in revenue, winning more than 11,000 customers and building a worldwide network of over 2,100 partners.”

The change was not unexpected. For the past two years Chuang had been serving as interim CEO and COO managing BEA’s global operations, including engineering, product development, marketing, sales, services, finance, MIS, corporate development, business planning, developer services and human resources.

In leaving the leadership position with the company, Coleman cited the desire to phase himself out of day-to-day operations before his 55th birthday.

The company’s third co-founder, Edward Scott remains a “consultant at large.”

The task ahead, say BEA executives, is to continue to build the company for the long term.