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posted on 23 May 2008 19:00

Following Drake Pruitt's own route from Bocada marketing to CEO, VP Marketing Nancy Hurley has now forced out Pruitt and become CEO herself.

Pruitt became CEO in July 2006 amidst talk of selling the stand-alone backup reporting aka data protection management (DPM) company. Two years on and history repeats itself.

Hurley was recruited by Pruitt eighteen months ago, oh sweet irony, to be VP marketing and business development. She
progressed to more operational management being given leadership of the sales organisation.

Bocada was focussed solely on backup reporting; making sure backup jobs had run properly. Now it is moving into unified data protection management looking at intelligent analysis of protection set ups. Hurley laid out a new product direction as well as running the sales force and this convinced the board that she had what Pruitt lacked; a means to take Bocada forward.

A board member, Greg Gottesman, MD of Madrona Venture Group, explained this: "Nancy has spearheaded the new strategic direction for Bocada. Nancy has that rare combination of being super-strong both strategically and operationally. The board is confident she can execute on what we think will be a fast-growing market segment in data protection."

The company statement quotes her as saying: "I am excited to be taking on this role as Bocada drives ahead against our recently announced Unified Management Platform strategy. The company has a unique opportunity to once again lead the way by creating an intelligent, heterogeneous centralized environment for end-to-end data protection management and analysis."

The company describes its situation thus: "customers are required to manage multiple heterogeneous data protection applications from disparate consoles, adding to operational and administrative complexity. Bocada is addressing this issue by providing a centralized management console to application servers, centrally viewing data protection schedules, and monitoring for policy adherence. Combining this functionality with the industry-leading Bocada Enterprise reporting functionality provides users with full end-to-end management of the data protection environment."

If Bocada can cover the full gamut of data protection: bakup to tape and disk, snapshot, replication, and disaster recovery, and cover virtualized servers (VMware and its new Site Recovery Manager, Citrix, Virtual Iron and HyperV) then it's in with a chance but it has to offer significantly more than other DPM suppliers, such as EMC with its acquired WysDM.

Before joining Bocada, Nancy Hurley was Senior Director of Storage Software Marketing for Sun Microsystems. Before Sun, she was a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). Prior to ESG, she served as the Worldwide Strategic Planning Manager for Tektronix Communications Test Group and was with Hewlett Packard for 10 years in various sales and marketing roles.

She seems determined to take Bocada forward, building on a partnership with Microsoft but, in a world where standalone DPM companies are diminishing in number, her effective job might be to revitalize the company to a point where it can be sold. Venture capitalists want a return and they'll take it where and when they can.

Drake Pruitt's fate is unknown.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}