Sun’s Green Lands at Utility Computing Play

Richard Green, the executive who exited Sun Microsystems after it settled with Microsoft almost two weeks ago, has landed at a utility computing start-up.

The former head of Sun’s software tools division has joined Cassatt, a San Jose, Calif.-based infrastructure software start-up headed by BEA co-founder and former CEO Bill Coleman, who was also once a Sun employee.

Green will serve as executive vice president of product development and lead global software development efforts at Cassatt, which is competing with giants such as IBM, HP and even Sun for a wedge of the utility computing pie.

Because news of Green’s imminent departure leaked out shortly after the news of a settlement between Sun and Microsoft hit, it was widely assumed that Green had fallen out with Sun, his employer for the last 14 years, over the settlement. After all, Green had testified for Sun against Microsoft in
previous antitrust cases and it was believed his departure was in defiance
over the settlement.

But subsequent reports debunked that theory, noting that Green left to take an easier position and had actually announced his resignation before the Sun/Microsoft rapprochement.

Still, his new position will require him to help get a fledgling company off the ground and compete with the likes of IBM and HP.

Employing a services-oriented architecture (SOA) model of distributed computing, Cassatt is crafting software that addresses the transition of legacy applications to more fluid J2EE and Web services applications to automate business processes.

The company employs virtualization methods of
pooling resources to networking, storage, computation and application layers to achieve dynamic, on the fly computing in data enters. The idea is that instead of adding additional machines, Cassatt’s parallel computing approach will allow applications to scale out.

“Cassatt represents a fantastic opportunity for me to tackle a vital and unaddressed challenge facing the future of enterprise architecture,” Green said in a statement. “I’m also delighted to be working again with Bill and the strong executive team he has assembled.”

A 20-year veteran of the software industry, Green has held a number of key positions during his career at Sun, including vice president of Java and XML software and vice president of the Solaris Products Group. He also led product development, strategy, business model creation and R&D at Sun.

Green was passionate about interoperability with Sun’s Java language and attended several meetings to work out developmental differences with rival IBM.

As the Eclipse open-source tools association revved for a relaunch as an independent organization from IBM, Green wrote a
letter to the group challenging the group to be more than an “exemplary framework” and to “push the organization to be a unifying force for Java technology.”

In related news, Cassatt executive vice president Steve Oberlin has been promoted to Chief Scientist. Oberlin, chief architect of the original CRAY T3D and T3E systems parallel processing systems, will focus on scale-out grid computing initiatives.