He spoke today with Computerworld about his time at CA, and about what he hopes to accomplish in his new job. Excerpts from that interview follow:

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. I have enormous respect for CA CEO John Swainson and CA in general and their opportunity in the marketplace. 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 divested the Ingres database products from CA last year to create Ingres Corp. Is that how you'd work? Garnett & Helfrich is different from other venture firms that take stand-alone businesses and make them public.... Garnett and Helfrich focuses on the venture buyout with larger technology companies. They're looking for a division or business unit that may not be strategic to that 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 new a business model and focus to create something. Carving out Nortel's blade server switch business is an example.

Many observers see the smaller technology firms 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. Yes, smaller companies have less of an installed base to worry about, but lack the scale for large distribution.

Did CA feel bureaucratic? No. CA has an incredible opportunity in front of them. Think of how CA has come to market with Enterprise IT Management products. Think about how far CA's come with security in the last three years. CA does not feel bureaucratic.