A former Sun Microsystems executive who left the company in June has turned up at a startup formed by another Sun refugee.
Shahin Khan, a VP at Sun who left the high-end hardware vendor after eight years, has joined Azul Systems Inc., a company formed headed by Stephen DeWitt, another former VP at Sun. Khan, whose computer-industry resum dates back more than 20 years and includes stints at Cray Research, Floating Point Systems, and Cornell University, last month became chief marketing officer for Azul, the company will announce Thursday.
Azul plans to bring to market next year servers it says can handle large loads of software written in the Java and Microsoft .Net programming environments. Azul also has designed its own chips, with instruction sets optimized for running apps written with those technologies.
Khan says he left Sun for the chance to join a young company that's growing. Sun, meanwhile, has seen its sales decline sharply in recent years and has lost money as customers turn to lower-cost alternatives to its powerful computers.
"Bill Joy once said that 'innovation happens elsewhere,' " Khan says, referring to Sun's co-founder and former chief scientist, who left the company last year. "That's certainly true in this industry."
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