Ex-Novell exec joins StreamServe as CEO

05.04.2005
Von Todd R.

Former Novell Inc. executive Chris Stone has been named CEO and president of StreamServe Inc., a business communications management vendor.

In an announcement Monday, the Burlington, Mass.-based company said Stone replaces StreamServe co-founder Hans Otterling, who will become vice chairman of the board.

Stone previously was a vice chairman of Novell Inc. and left the company last November after helping Novell acquire SUSE Linux AG, leading the company on an open-source track.

Stone, 47, who was second in command at Novell to Chairman and CEO Jack Messman, was responsible for engineering, product management and alliances. He started at the company in 1997 as executive vice president of corporate strategy and development.

Since leaving Novell last year, Stone said he did some consulting, took some time off and looked at his options in the IT industry.

"I wanted to get back inside a small technology company that"s needed focus around its technology and marketing," Stone said today. "That"s what I like doing and this one appeared."

StreamServe has more than 4,200 customers in 130 countries, including Bayer AG, BMW, Circuit City, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and Overture.

StreamServe technologies focus on helping companies manage the information in their organization by collecting, organizing and making it usable on any kind of device. "It could be any kind of document you could imagine," Stone said. "It"s an incredible niche."

StreamServe products include output, distribution and presentment software that can be used with other business information systems. The products enable companies to present customized and personalized documents from legacy and ERP applications, the company said.

"As co-founder and former CEO, I could not think of anyone better suited to lead StreamServe in the future than Chris Stone," Otterling said in a statement. "The company has grown every year since its inception 10 years ago, and Chris has the skills and experience to accelerate that growth."

Before joining Novell, Stone was CEO and founder of the Object Management Group, a nonprofit consortium that produces and maintains computer industry specifications for interoperable enterprise applications (see story).

StreamServe was founded in Sweden in 1995.