Buying high-volume server startup brings Sun founder and former Cisco VP back to fold

February 11, 2004

1 Min Read
Sun Deals for Handy Andy

Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) has rehired its first employee, Andreas "Andy" Bechtolsheim, and plans to buy a stealthy startup he's heading up (see Sun to Acquire Kealia).

The news furthers Sun's efforts to regain some of the luster it's lost in the downturn, in part by returning to its roots as a technology innovator.

During Sun's quarterly product launch yesterday, CEO Scott McNealy gleefully presented Bechtolsheim as the latest addition to the executive staff, while reminiscing about their long acquaintance. After meeting McNealy at Stanford, Bechtolsheim, a designer of single-board workstations, became employee number one at Sun, which was founded in 1982. He was VP of technology there through 1995, when he left to found Granite Systems, which was sold to Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) and became part of that company's gigabit switching unit.

For the last several months, Bechtolsheim's been heading up Kealia Inc., which Sun will buy in a "stock-for-stock merger," terms undisclosed, by the end of next quarter (see Sun to Acquire Kealia). Kealia's employee count includes 58 engineers, Bechtolsheim says.

Kealia's been working on high-performance servers, thought to be aimed at the digital video market. Its existence, and Bechtolsheim's involvement in it, was first reported by Light Reading back in October 2003 (see Is Cisco Tuning Into Video? and Kealia Project Raises Questions).

Read the full story on Byte and Switch.

— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

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