BlueArc's Barrall Says Bye Bye

BlueArc Corp. founder Geoff Barrall today made official what has been expected for months when he stepped down as CTO of the private NAS company (see BlueArc Has New CTO).

Barrall started BlueArc in 1998 and helped it haul in $157 million in funding and develop three generations of NAS products (see BlueArc Titan to Battle Giants). He says he left on good terms but no longer has any role at BlueArc.

Shmuel Shottan, who previously managed BlueArcs engineering team, takes over as CTO. Shottan joined BlueArc in September 2001 and led the engineering team that developed its second- and third-generation SiliconServer NAS systems. He worked with BlueArc CEO Gianluca Rattazzi at Meridian Data and Parallan Computer.

The move was no surprise. Barrall has been working as an advisor to other companies, despite his vows to remain focused on helping BlueArc grow (see Top Ten Turkey Awards).

“I’ve been with BlueArc six-and-a-half years, and when you’ve been with a company that long it’s time to do something new,” Barrall says.Barrall was often the public face of BlueArc and frequently represented the company at industry events. He leaves as executives of the NAS company say it is within a year of profitability, a goal that Barrall and other BlueArc execs have mentioned as a possible time for an IPO (see BlueArc Still Hot for IPO). Last spring, Barrall said he hoped the company would be profitable in the first quarter of this year (see SAN Snacks From SNW). Now the fourth quarter looks a more likely target.

There are no indications that Barrall was pushed out or left on poor terms, although his role diminished after former McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) marketing chief Mike Gustafson took over as BlueArc president in June (see Gustafson Leads Exec Carousel).

“Maybe things weren’t progressing as fast as Geoff hoped for as far as the company getting profitable, but it seems he just got bored and wanted to try something new,” says an industry source familiar with BlueArc’s executive team.

Barrall's departure continues a string of recent executive departures in the industry. It follows Greg Reyes’s surprising departure as Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) CEO by one day, and comes within a month after Debbie Miller of Maranti Networks Inc. and Dennis Grant of CreekPath Systems Inc. left as CEOs of their companies (see Brocade Switches CEOs, Restates , Maranti's Minus a CEO, and CreekPath Seeks New CEO). Also, Mark Ward departed as head of Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek)'s (NYSE: STK) North American sales last week (see StorageTek Sales VP Scoots).

“We’re in a period of change,” Barrall says of the storage industry. He says he would eventually like to start another company or take an executive post at an existing firm, but for now he will concentrate on his roles as a director of wide-area file services (WAFS) startup Tacit Networks Inc., and an adviser with switch vendor Brocade and disk-backup startup Data Domain Inc.— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch