Ex-Sun exec returns to run software group

ZDNet Australia's sister site CNET News.com has learned that Rich Green is the latest in a series of former executives the company has lured back.

The server and software company plans to announce the move on the same day Sun is holding a quarterly product announcement in Washington, DC, sources familiar with the executive appointment said. Sun declined to comment for this story, but Cassatt confirmed the move.

Green left Sun in 2004 to become executive vice president of product development at Cassatt, a start-up focusing on managing large groups of servers. He had been leading Java work at Sun as vice president of programming tools.

Sun's last EVP was John Loiacono, who left Sun for Adobe Systems in March. Newly named Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz, who held the software chief post from 2002 to 2004, had been acting software EVP.

During his tenure at Sun, Green was instrumental in ending a long-running dispute with Microsoft, hammering out a US$1.95 billion payment to Sun to settle an antitrust lawsuit and licence patents. Now at Sun, he'll oversee a massive attempt to make Sun's software relevant and profitable by making it free and open-source.

Green is one of several returning executives who Sun Chairman Scott McNealy likes to highlight as the company tries to argue that it has its dot-com mojo back.

"We've got them coming back in droves -- Andy Bechtolsheim and Mike Lehman and Peter Ulander and Karen Tegan," McNealy said in an interview last week. "There's a boomerang hitting my door, it seems, every five e-mails these days."

But at least one Java executive won't be returning to Sun: Rob Gingell, who also left for Cassatt in 2004 and who will replace Green, said Steve Wilson, Cassatt's vice president of product marketing. Gingell was instrumental in building the Java Community Process by which the software technology is jointly governed by Sun and a host of other interested companies.

"We wish Rich nothing but the best," Wilson said. "With all the changes at Sun management, he's got a big opportunity to influence change at one of the biggest companies in the world."