Avocent Corp. has announced that its board of directors has named Michael J. Borman, 53, to serve as the company's chief executive officer. He starts as CEO effective today, July 15, and also was elected as a member of the company's board of directors.
Borman most recently served as vice president, Worldwide Sales, IBM Software Group, where he was responsible for annual revenues of over $15 billion and a sales force of over 15,000 people. His previous leadership roles at IBM included general manager of the i-Series and p-Series server product lines as well as other executive positions in general management, including overseas assignments in Asia. Borman also served as president and chief operating officer of Blue Martini Software.
"Mike brings with him a strong track record of execution and proven leadership ability," said Ed Harper, Avocent's chairman of the board and interim chief executive officer. "During many in-depth conversations with Mike, we were impressed by his understanding of our business and the common vision we share in positioning the company for long-term sustainable growth. We view this highly strategic appointment of Mike with his demonstrated ability to grow both software and hardware sales, his technical knowledge, and his proven ability to elicit support from all levels of channel distribution, as a crucial step in Avocent's transformation in becoming a leader in IT operations management. Mike clearly has the ability to lead Avocent to the next stage. We are very pleased that Mike has chosen Avocent."
"I am excited to be joining the outstanding talent at Avocent," said Borman. "I look forward to working with the leadership team already in place to capitalize on Avocent's innovative products and solutions and help the company achieve its next phase of growth. Avocent has excellent opportunities to offer its premier customer base as well as new customers exciting new solutions to reduce costs and simplify their IT operations."
Borman first joined IBM as a programmer in 1977 and held a variety of positions including vice president of Worldwide Sales and Operations, Web Servers; vice president, Small and Medium Business, North America; director, Strategy for Asia Pacific and general manager for Distribution and SMB for Asia Pacific. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg School - Northwestern University and a BS degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Illinois.
Harper will continue to serve as chairman of the board.
Avocent Acquires Two Companies
Earlier, Avocent announced it has completed the acquisition of Touchpaper Group Ltd., a privately held provider of IT business management solutions based in Woking, U.K., for approximately $45 million. Avocent also announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the assets and liabilities of Ergo 2000, Inc., a privately held provider of rack-mounted LCD consoles based in Fullerton, California, for approximately $27.5 million.
In 2007, Touchpaper had revenues of approximately $34 million and Ergo 2000 had revenues of approximately $33 million. Avocent expects that the Ergo 2000 acquisition will close later this quarter and that each will be accretive to operational earnings per share in 2008. These acquisitions are part of an ongoing, larger strategy to invest in and enhance Avocent product offerings in IT operations management.
"With these acquisitions, Avocent continues to expand the IT operations management solutions that reach from the desktop to the data center," said Harper. "The Touchpaper technology has been integrated into the Avocent LANDesk Service Desk product for nearly two years. This acquisition will broaden our desktop management solutions as well as fully integrate with our existing data center solutions," Harper continued.
"Both acquisitions deliver on Avocent's promise to help IT operations handle and simplify the growing complexity of managing data center and desktop assets in today's organizations," added Harper. "Avocent has taken an aggressive position in delivering the framework and toolsets necessary for enterprises to realize a solid ROI on their IT investment," he said.
In acquiring Touchpaper, Avocent further extends its portfolio of incident management, problem management, and service-desk capabilities. Avocent's use of Touchpaper technology enables service desk technicians to consolidate call logging, problem management, configuration management, and change management into a single application that greatly smoothes the process of trouble ticketing for customers.
"As a global provider of relocation services, we rely on Avocent's technology to enable our IT personnel to be proactive and more productive when handling service desk requests," said Joseph Leyva, service desk supervisor of Graebel Companies. "By integrating service desk technology with IT best practices, such as ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), we can resolve problems efficiently and stay focused on our core business."
Avocent plans to integrate Touchpaper technology with its management software and platforms to bring service desk functionality to data centers, enabling a tighter coupling of service management into IT operations management.
With the acquisition of the assets of Ergo 2000, Avocent further expands its portfolio of advanced rack management products, an important component of IT operations management in the data center. Ergo 2000 reduces the time and cost of diagnosis and remediation of problems in the data center through the use of an LCD rack-based console that can enhance switch capability and provide a means for spotting problems with any servers in the rack and quickly resolving them before they can cause system downtime. Ergo 2000's product portfolio aligns well with Avocent's market-leading console switching products and will contribute revenue growth opportunity for both OEM and branded customers.
"Today's organizations are trying to keep up with the continuous pace of technology change and growing business requirements. The importance of management technologies to monitor and manage the wide array of hardware and software systems deployed in the enterprise has increased steadily," said Natalie Lambert, senior analyst at Forrester Research, in the November 2007 report, Topic Overview: IT Management Software. "Meanwhile, the increased attention being paid to governance, compliance, and financial responsibility leads firms to rethink their approach to IT management--shifting from the management of devices on the network to a more holistic focus on automating IT processes and delivering IT services back to the business."
The acquisitions allow Avocent to help its enterprise customers simplify the challenges of managing ever-increasing infrastructure complexity--from the desktop to the data center--by providing an end-to-end IT operations management framework.
The purchases will be funded from Avocent's cash and line of credit.
About Avocent Corp.
Avocent (NASDAQ: AVCT) delivers IT infrastructure management solutions that reduce operating costs, simplify management and increase the availability of critical IT environments 24/7 via integrated, centralized in-band and out-of-band hardware and software solutions. Additional information is available at http://www.avocent.com/.
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