SM: Based on your core market where you are selling into the $350 million install base, how far can you go? Can you double that? MB: Assuming a $1 billion business, I would like to see the Internet as 40%-50% of my business. The remainder should come from a mixture of other businesses.
SM: Are you going to take it to the enterprise data center? MB: Actually we won’t. We do not focus on running SAP, Oracle or databases. We are trying to take all the redundancy out of hardware that we can. We know servers are going to fail. Our view is that you should let them
SM: Your retirement became more of a sabbatical. MB: It sure did. I thought I was retired, but in Silicon Valley there is no such thing as retirement. I decided to sit on the board of a public company. I was looking for smaller public companies or for troubled companies that I could help.
SM: From your perspective, what does it take to become a $1 billion+ company? MB: When you have your core, you need to identify key elements and prepare for the transition. You need to bring your install base with you and make sure you transition them. You need it to have multiple geographies and routes
SM: How long were you at Oracle? MB: I worked for Larry for about eight years. I am definitely in the Larry Ellison fan club. He is one of the smartest technicians and hardest driving executives I have ever met. I think the world of him.
SM: What role did you play at Tesseract? MB: I was part of senior management and ran all of engineering. Coming into the early 1990s another team was forming to start a company called Scopus Technologies. There were a gaggle of companies going into what we termed field sales automation or a contact center; it
Mark Barrenechea is president and CEO of Rackable Systems. Before joining Rackable he served as executive vice president and CTO for Computer Associates. Prior to CA, he was senior vice president of Applications Development at Oracle and reported directly to Larry Ellison. Earlier, he served as vice president of Development at Tesseract, which was purchased
SM: Is there anything else you would like to discuss that is relevant to your company? GK: There is another project that is driving part of our company economics. That is the high density vertical growing system; we are rolling it out as a commercial product.