History 2005: Alain Andreoli Abruptly Fired from Xiotech

Alain Andreoli was abruptly fired from Xiotech and replaced by Casey Powell as president and CEO of the company.

Powell was most recently CEO of Stonefly Networks (where he remains on the board), a start-up in IP SAN solutions. He, in turn, was replaced by Bill Atkinson, former president and CEO of Astute Networks, yet another storage start-up, this one involved in silicon-based protocol acceleration processors.

In the ongoing CEO musical chairs, Mike Heil takes over the helm as president and CEO of Astute Networks.

What would explain such a sudden departure of Andreoli? It certainly wasn’t his poor performance, as even the press release announcing his departure acknowledges: “Alain was responsible for accelerating the growth and broadening [Xiotech’s] solutions and services.” Apparently that wasn’t enough.

Oak Investment Partners, which accounts for 2 of the 4 veteran members of Xiotech’s board, has invested heavily in the company, on the order of $100 million, and is starting to become anxious to see a high return. So while no one reproaches anything of Andreoli the ‘workaholic,’ as his co-workers refer to him, particularly since he fulfilled the current business plan, growing Xiotech’s sales by 25% in 2004 with initial profits projected for this year.

At the same time, he does not quite have the “Wall Street” profile or background, and is therefore perhaps not the man of the hour for an IPO or acquisition.

And apparently, the board did not feel it had the time required for him to become that man. Everyone is in a hurry. Haste makes waste, of course, as long as your willing to pay to dump…

So Andreoli was replaced from one day to the next by Powell, who has some experience in the investor relations side, not so much during his lightning tour at Stonefly, but certainly before. As co-founder, chairman and CEO of Sequent Computer Systems, Powell was pivotal in the company’s acquisition by IBM in a deal valued at $810 million in 1999. Furthermore, he knows his way around Oak, as a wealthy man who has invested with the group. The new man of the hour, then.

Meanwhile, we should expect to see Andreoli pop up in an executive position at a large storage company or at the head of another start-up.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 205 on January 2005 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.