Sun Developer Journal on Ulitzer

Not content with running off some Sun customers and piggybacking on Sun resellers, HP has plucked Randy Seidl, the senior vice-president of Sun's North America region global sales and services organization, out of there and made him head of Americas sales for its Enterprise Storage, Servers (ESS) and Networking global business unit, which is now run by David Donatelli, the big cheese HP poached from EMC.

David and Randy worked together at EMC so when David beckoned, Randy bolted rather than go to Oracle, Sun's prospective owner, or IBM, which also reportedly called up, but he figured upward mobility at IBM was constricted. He said Dell didn't call and dismissed it as an enterprise player.

Randy must be something of a coup for HP since he knows where Sun's bodies are buried and can doubtless tickle their paranoia about Sun's future.

He's supposed to have a deft hand with and a lot of long-time connections in the channels. HP already claims that the business it derives from resellers it shares with Sun is up 75% in the last three months.

Randy sounds particularly interested in the networking side of the job where margins are juicier than in servers. He said he'd rather be pushing to increase share in a high-margin business than to be Cisco entering a low-margin one.

HP and Cisco aren't the friends they used to be since Cisco decided to try its hand at servers. HP is however trying to stay friends with Oracle although Oracle dumped HP boxes as the basis of its Exadata data warehouse appliance in favor of Sun and is threatening to go head-to-head with HP in servers.

At Sun, Seidl used to be vice president of financial services responsible for the growth and profitability of Sun's enterprise offerings, including systems, storage, software and services. He and his team reportedly achieved margin growth of 80% and revenue growth of 35% from fiscal 2006 to fiscal 2008. In fiscal 2008, it was the top-selling organization globally for Sun in terms of growth and percent of goal achievement.

He was also once the CEO of Permabit, the storage software company with solutions focused on large data stores that scale into the multi-petabytes.