New Chapters Opening for Former Sun CEO

 
 
By Chris Preimesberger  |  Posted 2012-01-17 Email Print this article Print
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



Sidebar: New Chapters Opening for Former Sun CEO

Two years after the digestion of Sun into Oracle in January 2010, Schwartz's professional life is taking new turns into the private sector. He has stakes in hot IT markets such as enterprise social networking and collaboration (Moxie Software, board member), cloud-based job placement (Taleo, board member), smart-grid networking (Silver Spring Networks, board member) and health care (the forthcoming Picture of Health).

Moxie originally was named nGenera, but it changed identities in 2010. CEO Tom Kelly, who brought Schwartz to the company board in fall 2011, clearly is aiming his company to become the most user-friendly social media application suite available. Moxie offers both customer-facing and employee-facing software and has done exhaustive research on what users want to see in a social/collaborative network. Its main offering for internal social media is called Employee Spaces.

Silver Spring Networks, founded as in 2002 as Real Time Techcomm, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering. The company makes Web-enabled devices that connect homes with businesses -- items such as smart meters and electric-car-charging stations. It counts among its customers Florida Power & Light, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Baltimore Gas and Electric Company, among others. The company said that it currently has orders for 17 million of its devices; 8 million were networked as of June 30, 2011.

Taleo provides a cloud-based talent/training/salary/recruiting-management software suite. Its purpose-built infrastructure is designed to manage a large number of users and transactions while providing a high level of security. Because it is a public-facing system used by millions of candidates a day, Taleo has to deliver an easy-to-use and scalable result. The company has a diverse ecosystem of third-party services that include background checks, assessments and tax credit screening. So it's a full-time employment resource.

The company claims it has more than 5,000 customers, including about half of the Fortune 100 companies.




 
 
 
 
Chris Preimesberger Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
 
 
 
 
 
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