Bio:
Name: Alok Mohan
Place of Birth: Calcutta, India
Position: President, COO, and Board Member, SCO
Time in Current Position: Two weeks
Years in the Industry: 22 years
Car He Drives: Late-model Lexus
Favorite Non-Work Activities: Biking, golfing, surfing, and boogie-boarding
with his two sons, 10 and 14.
Pet Open Systems Peeve: "With the fading of IBM as the 'thought
leader,' no one has been able to fulfill that role effectively
although many are trying. The open systems movement could have,
however the UNIX wars left a void and the UNIX players have basically
left a space for a company like Microsoft able to mount a credible
attempt. The inability of the UNIX giants to come together on
a common standard in an earlier time frame has been a problem."
On UniForum: "Vendors and users need to support UniForum more.
It serves a very useful purpose in educating computing professionals.
Alok Mohan, from a North-Indian Hindu middle class family in
Calcutta, arrived on the East Coast of the United States in 1970
with a prestigious Indian engineering degree, $8 in cash, and
bus fare to Indiana. Today, he is the newly-appointed president
of The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) and a member of its board.
From India To Indiana
In the 1950s, Mohan's father was in the shipping business for
the Indian government service. In what must be the equivalent
of our modern "bring your kids to work" days, Mohan and his brother
sailed aboard American ships, where they met people from around
the world. In Calcutta, Mohan had access to a U.S. library and
American movies. He was intrigued by U.S. culture and people,
and set his sights on America at a very early age.
Mohan went to college at the well-known Indian Institute of Technology
in Kharagpur, which has as much school pride in Silicon Valley
as MIT. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1969
and worked as an engineer for one year afterwards at a chemical
plant.
Following his dream, in 1970, Mohan headed for graduate school
at Indiana University. He was new to this country, but met the
challenges of a foreign land undaunted, and worked his way through
business school. Between his first and second years at Indiana,
he interned at NCR. When he received his M.B.A. in Finance in
1972, he was asked to join NCR full time. There he stayed, with
the exception of 1975, a year which was devoted to helping his
brother set up a thermal protector manufacturing company in India.
(That company still exists and is quite profitable.)
Career Overview
Mohan was at NCR for 22 years, filling 11 jobs-in finance, product
management/marketing, strategic planning, and operations. Mohan
says he was never bored working at NCR. At times he would be
in a position for only four months, three of which were spent
traveling.
The last six years at NCR, Mohan was vice president of the workstation
products division and was an officer of the company, three years
as vice president of workstation products division and three
years in strategic planning and product management. Then, NCR
merged with AT&T Computer Division, a process that took close
to a year and a half, after which Mohan felt it was time to move
on. He opened his own consultancy in February of 1994, with SCO
as one of his early clients. By May, SCO's then-President and
CEO Lars Turndal asked Mohan to become chief financial officer
and senior vice president of operations.
Mohan initially had no intention of going full time at SCO. He
was not 100 percent sure of what he wanted to do, and he enjoyed
his freedom as a consultant. However, during his consulting for
SCO, Mohan realized what SCO needed to do to improve its performance
and decided to take the job.
Six months later, a time in which SCO's stock doubled, Turndal
asked Mohan to take on the role of president, COO, and become
a board member. He accepted, and now all senior managers in the
company except founder and Chief Technical Officer Doug Michels,
will report to Mohan. Turndal continues as CEO.
Climbing The Corporate Ladder
Mohan is open minded and sees part of his role as listening,
teaching, and informing, in contrast to dictating. He calls Chuck
Exley, former CEO of NCR, his mentor. Mohan says that Exley understands
the fundamentals of business modeling, and as they went through
the process of moving NCR onto the open cooperative computing
strategy, Mohan found himself one of a half dozen people who
brainstormed about the future of the company. Mohan is also a
rigorous planner and modeler, and will tell you that he often
lets economics dictate decisions. To succeed, though, good business
people need more than quantitative skills. Ethics, openness,
drive and willingness, and the ability to see things from the
customer's perspective and move away from the bits and bytes
of technology are all essential.
NCR was an early proponent of open systems with its UNIX Towers
and PCs, and included open systems as part of its belief system.
As head of strategic planning, Mohan guided a strategic redirection
to open cooperative computing, implying top-to-bottom UNIX and
Intel. That strategic direction took NCR away from previous proprietary
architectures.
The NCR merger with AT&T took some of the focus away from NCR's
new vision, and spelled the end of Chuck Exley's career. Mohan
laments the fact that the merger meant, for all intents and purposes,
NCR will not be able to focus on the horizontal open systems
"thought leadership" vision he and Exley and the team had dreamed
of. Instead, he sees AT&T as focused on solutions in vertical
markets, exemplified not by the choices (pull marketing) and
openness in the NCR strategy, but by the you will (push marketing)
attitude of their advertisements.
In his 22 years at NCR, Mohan participated in several business
cycles and helped move the company through many major changes.
He seems to have learned when to push for a change and when to
be patient. His first job was as a financial analyst. Mohan and
30 or so peer analysts were caught in the middle of a reengineering
phase as the company converted from electromagnetic to electronic
cash registers. People on the wrong side of the technology were
being fired just as he joined the company, and many workers were
waiting to see who would be in power and to hear which projects
would fly. The analysts spent a lot of time flying paper airplanes.
He found that for every major reengineering plan, there is a
time to be patient and wait for the new processes to unfold,
lest you get caught in an obsolete project group.
This doesn't necessarily mean that in his first days as president
of SCO, Mohan will find analysts flying airplanes, but to prevent
any confusion, he has already outlined his goals and explained
what SCO needs to do to be more profitable.
SCO: 1995 and Beyond
The company's stock price has just about doubled since the end
of June, and according to other top managers at SCO, Alok Mohan
is one of the major reasons why.
You might say Mohan's karma is very good, and he shares the wisdom
gained through 22 years at NCR with the much younger company
he now calls home. Already, he seems to fit in among long time
employees in all ranks and disciplines. His leadership style
is anti-hierarchical, with teamwork and shared vision the guiding
principles. He stresses that he is not alone in charge, but part
of a large team working to be the best SCO can be.
In six months as chief financial officer, he has set a course
to reign in expenses and redeploy marketing resources while working
on more focused positioning for SCO as the business-critical,
Windows-friendly server company. He believes the company must
manage expenses so that they grow only nominally, redeploy resources
to direct sales and marketing, continue to improve ISV relations,
and increase sales. SCO will continue to refine the open business
model, using important partners in the OEM and VAR businesses
to address a broader customer base. Mohan points out that SCO
has a high win rate when evaluated fairly in major accounts.
The direct sales force will champion fair evaluations while using
the VAR channels. Their target markets will remain the medium-sized
enterprises with lots of replicated sites.
This month, SCO paid $14 million to acquire Visionware of Leeds,
England (with offices in Menlo Park, CA), a company with $12
million in annual revenue. Mohan said the engineering and management
team and the technology were both important in the purchase.
The X-server, terminal emulation, and PC Connect products, as
well as the new SQL Server product, are part of what SCO needs
to help deliver an ever-easier environment for open systems users.
The combination of Windows-friendly value added at the desktop
and SQL at the server gives SCO some control at both ends of
the client/server pipeline.
When asked about competing in a Microsoft-centric industry, Mohan
points out that without UNIX, NT would have little competition.
They are careful allies. He thinks the competition keeps both
UNIX vendors and Microsoft more ambitious. Microsoft still owns
15 percent of SCO stock and Microsoft has a seat on SCO's board.
Mohan points out that when competitive topics come up at board
meetings, the Microsoft board member may be asked to leave the
room.
In Mohan's opinion, SCO is a gold mine. The company was already
moving in the right direction and pushing to become profitable
when he joined it. SCO has done well from a market-share standpoint
by owning 37 percent of the UNIX-on-Intel market, according to
IDC published data. SCO is the volume server/host vendor and
its business model fits well with the open-industry standard
movement.
SCO's future is tied to how it can leverage its own alliances.
SCO follows a leveraged R&D model and attempts to take the best
value-add from the industry and integrate it into its own products.
SCO's leveraged distribution model also is based on selling and
delivering products through partners. SCO does not sell directly,
although Mohan will increase the presence of account reps in
major accounts in support of the OEM and VAR distributors.
The biggest satisfaction at SCO for Mohan is the strong management
team and the capabilities of the people. Mohan's personal target
when joining SCO was to triple the stock price and SCO is well
on its way. He is excited about the opportunity of successfully
growing the business while maintaining good profitability. Mohan
looks forward to the first half of 1995, when SCO will announce
Everest, an new version of the business-critical server with
improved scalability.
Mohan brings a bit of the NCR open cooperative vision to SCO.
And just maybe as a result, SCO will find its niche as a thought
leader among customers devoted to open systems.
(Sally Atkins is manager of standards and evaluation for Stanford
University's Information Technology Services.)