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CTO to leave CA, join venture firm

15.05.2006
Mark Barrenechea, who was named CA Inc.'s chief technology officer in January, said last week that he's leaving the software vendor effective June 16 to become a director at Garnett & Helfrich Capital, a venture firm in Menlo Park, Calif. Barrenechea has worked at CA since 2003, also serving as executive vice president of product development and chief technology architect. He spoke with Computerworld about his plan to join Garnett & Helfrich, which last fall bought CA's Ingres database and formed a new company to develop and market the open-source software.

How long has this career transition been in the works? Over the last couple of months. Opportunity, Thomas Edison said, is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work. For me, it means taking 84 [fiscal] quarters with operating experience in software and now being able to apply that to creating independent companies, and helping build management teams and what I think of as relevancy in the market. That's an opportunity I could not pass up.

Garnett & Helfrich bought Ingres from CA last year and created a new company called Ingres Corp. Is that how you'll work? Garnett & Helfrich is different from other venture firms that take stand-alone businesses and make them public. They're looking for a division or business unit that may not be strategic to a company but could be strategic in the market. So it's working with top technology firms in hardware and software, and spending time looking for assets that are strategic and should be stand-alone and need a new business model.

Many people see the smaller technology vendors as the ones with energy and innovation. Is that part of your motivation to leave? Well, innovation is a big word. Yes, more needs to be written about the difficulty of being innovative within large companies. Contrast how innovations happen with closed-source versus open-source. With open-source, you know right away if your idea is relevant or not, and there are short release cycles. If the product's not relevant, you die pretty quickly.

Did CA feel bureaucratic to you? No. CA has an incredible opportunity in front of them. CA does not feel bureaucratic.

Is your departure related at all to former CEO Sanjay Kumar's recent guilty plea to accounting fraud charges or to concerns that your resume might be tainted by the company's past legal woes? It's completely unrelated. I joined in 2003 after those issues surfaced. For 16,000 employees at CA, I don't think [they] are focused on the government trial and issues. So, those issues didn't affect my decision to join or to depart from CA.