In a sudden shift of corporate leadership, Scott Dietzen has resigned as chief technology officer of BEA Systems .
Word of the departure of the technology leader came in the form of an internal and confidential e-mail obtained by internetnews.com. “Scott Dietzen has decided to take a well deserved break and move on after seven years of helping us promote WebLogic’s brand, ” Chairman and CEO Alfred S. Chuang wrote to employees of the San Jose, Calif.-based maker of server software.
The seven-year veteran is moving on to unspecified endeavors, according to an e-mail from the company’s CEO. Dietzen came to BEA via the acquisition of WebLogic. Prior to that, he was the principal technologist for IBM’s Enterprise File Systems division Transarc.
Recently, Dietzen championed BEA’s attempts at getting rival Sun Microsystems to open source its Java programming language to some type of public licensing.
In his address, Chuang positioned Dietzen’s departure as part of the creation of a Worldwide Field Organization encompassing the sales, services and marketing departments. The field organization will be headed by Tom Ashburn, former head of BEA’s Worldwide Services division, with Charlie Ill, executive vice president of worldwide sales, and Tod Nielsen, chief marketing officer, reporting directly to him.
Chuang himself will take the reins as head of the Product Leadership Team, while Mark Carges will take Dietzen’s place as CTO. Carges, former president of the Enterprise Frameworks division, has moved up the BEA ranks from products to global sales.
According to BEA’s preliminary Q2 results, its services business grew over 20 percent. In the internal memo, Chuang pointed to the extension of BEA’s indirect channels and very strong growth in the EMEA region as indications that the business is healthy.
He said the immediate challenges are “hardening” version 8.1, building a telecommunications-oriented application server and enhancing the portal and integration server products. BEA plans to ship the core 9.0 product set first half of 2005.
Editor’s note: internetnews.com interviewed Dietzen last October about BEA’s position in the Web services marketplace.
