Be, Inc., Company Backgrounder
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Be, Inc. Overcoming the Limitations of Today’s Computing Architectures The Vision Chairman and CEO Jean-Louis Gassée Be offers an exciting alternative to the current evolution- Mr . Gassée has overal l res p ons i bi l i t y for Be’s operati on s . ary approach to advancing personal computing plat- Prio r to forming Be, he was associ a t ed with Appl e forms. Comp u ter for ten ye a rs . He served as pres i d ent of Appl e Be targets this new approach at the very markets where product s , the R&D and manuf a ctur ing divis i o n of Appl e , customers and developers are most in need of innovative fr om 1988–1990. Before that, he was Appl e ’s seni o r vic e technology, and where the limitations of older architec- pres i d ent of res e a r ch and develo pme nt (1987–1988), an d tures are the most visible: Media and compute-intensive vic e pres i d ent of produc t develo pme nt (1985–1987). In applications. 1 9 8 2 ,M r. Gassée fou n d ed and ran Appl e ’s Frenc h opera- tion , Apple Comp u ter Fran c e SARL. Today’s platforms are immensely successful in the office market because they wisely adopted an approach of Prior to joining Apple, Mr. Gassée was president and continuous incremental improvements, thus developing general manager of the French subsidiary of Exxon Corp. He also held several management positions with a huge legacy of office automation applications. But that Data General Corp., including general manager for approach has its downside. Today, architectures are France, area manager for Latin countries, and marketing mind-numbingly complex, large, and fragile—the result manager for Europe. He spent six years at Hewlett of more than a decade of patches and extensions. The Packard, serving in several positions, including sales interval between major revisions is usually measured in manager of Europe. years (Windows 95 was launched five years after Vice President, Engineering Windows 3.0, and more years will elapse between Erich Ringewald System 7 and Copland). New technology is becoming harder and harder to integrate. The most glaring of Mr. Ringewald oversees software and hardware engineer- many examples is multiprocessing. Multiprocessing is an ing. He joined Be after more than six years at Apple Computer, where he held several software engineering inexpensive way to increase computing power, yet evolu- and R&D management positions. He was the manager of tionary platforms cannot support it. special projects software (1989–1991), assistant to the Be, Inc. was founded in 1990 by Jean-Louis Gassée, director of European R&D at Apple Computer Europe former president of Apple’s product division, to break (1988–1989), manager of the next generation system the boundaries imposed by the evolutionary approach. software group (1987–1988), author of Multifinder and The first member of the Be product family, the BeBox™, manager of the MacOS group (1986–1987), and a was launched on October 3, 1995. This system, with its member of the Mac Plus ROM team (1985–1986). From combination of powerful hardware, a portable, object- 1983 to 1985, Mr. Ringewald was a senior software archi- oriented operating system, and a host of advanced tect for Tecmar, a manufacturer of expansion cards, hard sound, graphics, video, and communications capabili- disks, network hardware, and software for the IBM PC and the Macintosh. ties, is poised to become a significant alternative for next-generation applications. Vice President, Finance, and CFO Wes Saia The Team Mr. Saia is responsible for all areas of finance and control, including relationships with outside investors To achieve an ambitious vision in today’s competitive and legal counsel. He also manages personnel and business environment requires the right team above all general administration. Mr. Saia joined Be from Asante, else. We have assembled an outstanding management a company that specializes in networking products for and operations team, complemented by hardware and the computer industry. As Asante’s vice president of software engineers who are among the best and brightest finance and CFO from 1993–1994, he completed an in their fields. Equally important, our team is small, initial public offering that raised $25 million in cash. Mr. focused, and tight-knit—a key success factor for tackling Saia also served as vice president of finance and CFO at complex architectural challenges. Bimillenium, a startup software company, from 1992–1993, and as vice president of finance and CFO for ally store, retrieve, and update key information from Vitalink, a public company specializing in data commu- multiple sources. The combination of these features nications, from 1987–1991. While at Vitalink he also makes the BeBox particularly attractive to the fast-grow- completed an initial public offering and a secondary ing A/V market—currently valued at more than $7.3 round of public financing, raising a total of $45 million. billion by Dataquest—as well as to technology enthusi- Mr. Saia has also worked as a controller at Intel asts and hobbyists. (1983–1987), vice president of finance at Fox & The BeBox is also an excellent system for programming, Carskadon (1981–1983), and controller with Sprint and for compute-intensive applications, for video games, and Southern Pacific (1971–1981). for personal productivity tools. Vice President, Operations Tadek Margulewicz The Product Mr. Margulewicz handles all aspects of operations for The BeBox is the first true real-time, portable, object- Be, including manufacturing. He joined Be in 1993 after oriented system that features multiple PowerPC proces- five years at Sun Microsystems, where he focused on sors, true preemptive multitasking, an integrated improving operational efficiencies in manufacturing. database, fast I/O, and a wide range of expansion While at Sun he managed the risks and benefits associ- options—all at an extremely aggressive price that is well ated with outsourcing manufacturing and implemented below that of any competitive offering. a worldwide inventory management system, resulting in The hardware features two PowerPC 603 processors significantly improved asset management. From running at 66 MHz, room for 256 MB of RAM, and 16- 1982–1988 he was director of manufacturing and distri- bit CD-quality sound. It provides a broad spectrum of bution for Friden Alcatel, and was responsible for transi- expansion and I/O options, including three expansion tioning new products from design engineering into slots on the very fast (132 Mbits/sec) PCI bus for high- volume production. speed add-on cards; five expansion slots on the ISA bus Vice President and General Manager, Europe for low-cost, lower-bandwidth cards; four MIDI ports, a Jean Calmon high-speed SCSI-II port, and four serial ports. Mr. Calmon represents Be’s interests in Europe. He has Be’s system software is small, fast, and real-time. It more than 24 years of operational experience with major provides multithreading, multitasking, and memory companies in Europe, and has specialized in developing protection. On top of its proprietary kernel, Be has the operations of U.S. high-technology companies in designed a graphics server that delivers ultra-responsive, Europe. Mr. Calmon was most recently vice president, continuously updated windows; a database server that Europe, of EO, Inc., a subsidiary of AT&T, from supports live queries of user- or developer-defined 1992–1994. Prior to that, he was president of EDS collections of data; and a digital media toolkit that French operations. Previously, he was associated with allows for manipulation of real-time streams of Apple Computer from 1981–1990. As sales manager and audio/video data. All of this is accessible from an object- then general manager (France), he built Apple’s largest oriented C++ application framework. Be also ships a subsidiary and most successful network of resellers from graphical browser with every machine, which shows off inception to $270 million in revenues in five years. He many features of the OS and allows the user to manipu- also developed and implemented new distribution late all of the files and database objects on the computer. strategies while managing channels of distribution as For application development, Be offers the well as the large account and education business as CodeWarrior™ PowerPC development environment director of Apple Europe. Before Apple, Mr. Calmon from Metrowerks, along with full technical and user spent ten years with IBM as marketing representative documentation. Developers can use the current version and district manager in the computer division. of CodeWarrior hosted on the Macintosh for application development, and soon Be will offer the entire The Market CodeWarrior Integrated Development Environment— The BeBox enables users to run multiple compute-inten- including a high-speed linker, compiler, and debugger— sive programs simultaneously at blazing speed, synchro- native on the BeBox. nize music and sound, view and edit videos, take The BeBox also allows users to customize their systems advantage of telecommunications applications, and with standard components from the “PC clone organ access the Internet—all at the same time. Its built-in bank,” including monitors, keyboards, memory, hard database is accessible at all times, so users can continu- disks, CD-ROM drives, and modems. The Partnership Model Future Directions Be is already working with and actively recruiting soft- Be has created an architecture that can be broadly ware development partners, value-added resellers, expanded to meet evolving customer requirements and systems integrators, and manufacturers whose products technological capabilities. The BeBox is the first member or services will add value to the BeBox. of the Be product line, which is already being expanded Be offers independent software developers a compelling to include four-processor and portable configurations.