vol. XVII no. 2

				Page 4 Page 1 2 3 4 Perhaps it was only natural for Barnes's next career move to be to IBM itself. He was recruited in 1993 to launch the company's first parallel processor. Within two and a half years, the business had grown from a handful of scientific and technical computing customers with virtually no revenues to thousands of commercial and scientific customers generating more than $1 billion annually. In 1996, Barnes was appointed to IBM's senior management group, and his star continued to rise. As general manager of the Global Business Intelligence Solutions division, he drove more than $1 billion in sales annually for his division directly and more than $4 billion annually in sales across IBM. Key customer wins during his tenure included Citigroup, L.L. Bean, McDonald's, Pfizer, AT&T, American Express, the National Basketball Association, United Airlines, Blue Cross/Blue Shield and the states of California and Florida. The call to Silicon Valley came in 2000, when Barnes relocated to California to serve as president and CEO of Sagent Technology, a leading provider of business intelligence enterprise software. "I came out to be a part of the Silicon Valley gold rush and missed it," Barnes likes to say. Soon after his arrival, the dot-coms crashed, and within two years he had readied Sagent for sale. Barnes's next CEO position was at Intraspect Software, a company providing collaborative software to customers that include Bank of America, Barclays Global Investors, GE Capital and J.P. Morgan Chase. Barnes was recruited specifically to ready the company for a merger or acquisition with a larger company. He joined ActivCard this summer, drawn by its strong products and balance sheet. The company needed a senior management professional with strong skills in sales and marketing. The fit is a good one for Barnes's past experience and the company's promising future. "We are in a relatively new market, but people are starting to recognize the importance of what we offer," Barnes says. "In the post-9/11 world, our awareness of the need for security is high. Today, the biggest crime is identity theft." An alarming fact, but one sure to keep Barnes and ActivCard busy with innovations to catch the phish in the pond. Previous Page | Top

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