Former SAS Institute Inc. President and COO Andre Boisvert was appointed chairman of the board of directors of Sagent Technology Inc. Friday.
Boisvert joined the Sagent board last May, three months after stepping down at SAS, which is both a competitor and a partner of Sagents. He replaces company co-founder Ken Gardner, who is leaving Sagent to pursue other unspecified opportunities. Gardner was also Sagents CTO and previously served as its CEO.
Boisvert will chair the board of a troubled company. Sagent was forced to restate its revenues in November after discovering nearly $5 million in forged sales orders. It has been hit with several class-action shareholder lawsuits since then. For the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2001, the Mountain View, Calif., company posted a $30.2 million net loss on $34.3 million in revenues.
Boisvert joined SAS in January 2000 as vice president of business development and strategic investments, then was promoted to president and COO eight months later and was expected to lead privately-held SASs drive for an initial public offering. Though no explanation was ever given for his departure from SAS last January, most speculation revolved around his disagreements with SAS founder and CEO Jim Goodnight over the pace of change at the company as it prepared for the IPO. SAS remains private today and has set no timetable for when it will become public.
Boisvert was previously an executive at IBM and Cognos Inc. He replaces Gardner, who co-founded Sagent in 1995. Gardner had been a vice president at Borland International Inc. before that; Borland acquired another company he founded, ReportSmith Inc., in 1994. He was bumped up to chairman of Sagent in August 2000, when the company hired Ben Barnes—the former general manager of IBMs Global Business Intelligence unit—to replace him as CEO.
In a statement, Barnes said Gardner had positioned Sagent for continued growth in the business intelligence software market.
In other company news, on Monday, Sagent is expected to announce a new partner relationship with Hyperion Solutions Inc. that will call for Hyperion to resell Sagents data transformation and loading and front-end interface technologies.
