Sybase CEO - "big supporter of H-1B"

Date: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 12:27 PM

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

John Chen, CEO of Sybase said that he is a "supporter of the H-1B visa"
because the H-1Bs they use were people he trained in the United States.
Why didn't he train U.S. citizens so that he didn't have to hire H-1Bs?
Just to add a few more insults against U.S. citizens he went on to say
that we need better math and science education.

Chen is typical of the globalists who decry that government, not
industry should handle issues such as H-1B and the outsourcing of jobs.
He then goes on to gripe that the Chinese and U.S. governments need to
provide more protections for his money making copyrights. Government
control is OK with him unless it impedes his ability to make huge
profits.

Chen also thinks that bodyshops such as Wipro, Infosys and Tata are
very good companies. (Recall TATA from the previous newsletter).

http://www.computerworld.com/databasetopics/data/software/story/0,10801,82218,00.html

Q&A: Sybase CEO decries SCO 'garbage,' Oracle's behavior

By DON TENNANT
JUNE 17, 2003

John Chen, CEO of Dublin, Calif.-based Sybase Inc., spoke with

Computerworld yesterday about a range of controversial issues,
including The SCO Group Inc.'s Unix copyright infringement claims and
the security implications of offshore outsourcing. Excerpts from the
interview follow:

Given that Sybase has such a strong presence in Linux shops, how
concerned are you and your customers about SCO's claims? I have had
customers express concern about it. Two major customers of mine have
already told me that they're going to slow down their rollouts on Linux
and wait to see how this develops. So it has put a wrinkle in the
equation. Am I concerned about it? No. As long as the customers are
soliciting and getting my help to either get more apps migrated from
Unix to Linux or from NT to Linux, I'm doing the work anyway.

I and my customers are going to watch and see how the thing unfolds. As
an industry person, I think it's rather a shame. The Linux platform
serves a segment of the market, and I hate to see this being challenged
by a very established player. Ultimately, it hurts our industry and
innovation. If you stop the open-systems movement because of something
like this, it limits innovation and it only favors the big boys. You
want an open environment that players can add value to and thereby
expand IT budgets -- not shrink them. I think it's very unfortunate
that this garbage is being thrown around. A small group of players just
wants to protect the status quo.

John Chen, CEO of Sybase Inc.
Our industry right now needs some capital growth. Let's, for starters,
create more jobs for the people who have been displaced. This is not
the time for the industry [players] to fight among each other to slow
down the innovative process.

Sybase and PeopleSoft have had a strong partnership for years. What's
your take on Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's hostile takeover bid? Putting a
low-ball figure in, at least it disrupted the current PeopleSoft/J.D.
Edwards situation, and Larry obviously doesn't want to lose the No. 2
spot. If you go through Larry's numbers last quarter, his apps business
did not grow. In fact, foreign currency adjusted, his apps business may
have shrunk. The whole packaged apps business for everybody in the last
couple quarters has been weak, and it will continue to be weak until
the economy picks up. So this is a good time for them to consolidate
and boost their own apps business.

I don't compete in that, but I still don't want to see that -- a
limited number of choices has never been good for my industry. And it
certainly won't be good for Sybase, because Sybase and PeopleSoft have
a Tier 1 relationship; we have an installed base of 400 to 500
customers out there, and we're trying to push into new areas like
health care in China together.

Also, Larry went public to say that [PeopleSoft CEO Craig] Conway had
approached him a year ago. I don't know if it's true or not; I'm not in
a position to comment on that. But the code of engagement between CEOs
has certainly been violated. And I think that's a bad thing.

Earlier this month, you were elected to the board of directors of the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce. What issues do you want to advance in that
capacity? The most important one that I'm working on right now is to
try to make sure that our interests overseas, especially in the Asian
countries, are being watched and represented. For example, the Ministry
of Information Industry in China is trying to promote its own software
industry by putting some kind of artificial cap on how much software
[Chinese companies] can buy from foreign companies like ourselves. That
certainly is anti-[World Trade Organization] spirit.

A lot of our readers who are out of work are upset about the U.S. H-1B
policy. What do you think the chamber's position should be on that
policy? H-1B is not being fully utilized because we just don't have
enough jobs in the U.S. So right now, H-1B is not the biggest threat.
I'm a supporter of the H-1B visa, because most of the H-1B visa holders
are people we've trained in the U.S. I'd rather see the people we've
trained come back to the U.S. and help boost our IT development and
innovation. The chamber probably takes the same line -- let's create
more jobs in the U.S., and if they need to be filled by foreign
personnel, so be it. Ultimately, it helps the economy because it's
innovation.

I think your readers should be more concerned about the whole
outsourcing phenomenon. Outsourcing is good, except for cost reasons we
seem to be creating jobs overseas that have the potential in the future
to come and compete with us here in the U.S. If you take a look at
India, [outsourcing providers] Wipro, Infosys and Tata [Consultancy
Services] are very good companies; how they all came to being was to
help us as an alternative source of skilled technical personnel at a
much lower cost and with a more stable workforce. But I see the trend
over time being that they're going to try to ship us IT [products] that
we buy. That's OK from a globalization point of view. But we'd better
train our own people in the U.S. in math and science so we continue to
maintain the lead. That needs a little more work.

Are you equally concerned about the growth of outsourcing to China?
Yes, that too. And an offshoot of that -- and I don't want the
government to get involved in this, because government policy has never
helped us in these things -- is that the industry needs to get together
and create a certain standard on cybersecurity assurance. Because if
you have so many foreigners creating code that is ultimately shipped
back to the U.S., and if you have the U.S government policy of buying
off-the-shelf software, guess what's happening: We may be unknowingly
allowing backdoor traps in the code. Hackers could very well be putting
in compromising code. We have to be careful, because more and more
companies, by necessity, are building their code overseas.

The industry ought to come together and have some kind of standard,
equivalent to an ISO standard, that we subject all of our development
and code review to. The problem with the industry is we can never agree
on anything. But it's something we need to fix.

You've noted that the software piracy rate in China is around 95%,
which is a problem for Sybase. Why didn't that stand in the way of
donating $300,000 worth of software to China earlier this month to help
fight SARS (see story)? Because we do a very good business in China.
We're the No. 2 database company in China, rivaling Oracle. We have a
couple sectors that we claim leadership in, and we have a very good
relationship with the Chinese government. There's just too much
opportunity on the table, because China is very focused on buying
enterprise infrastructure software.

The Chinese government knows they need to crack down on the piracy
issue, because their agenda is to create their own software to be
exported. That's a bigger problem than my software being pirated --
they want to create intellectual property to compete with me, and they
may be doing it in such a way that the market isn't as open as it
should be. So the Chinese government has a vested interested to crack
down on it, because they want to provide an environment in which their
people can export software and compete with us in a knowledge-based
economy.

Back to Linux -- as a company that has built itself on Unix, how is
Linux changing your world? Several years ago, we identified Linux as
somewhat disruptive, so all of our products run on Linux. In fact, in
July or thereabouts, we're opening a Linux competency center to help
companies on Wall Street, and share experience if they have to migrate
Unix apps to Linux and vice versa.

Do you see Sybase on Unix gradually declining, as a trend among your
customers? The Sybase-on-Unix installed base will have to decline
because some of the apps are going to move. But I don't see it
happening in a major way, because most of the Linux apps are new apps.

Are any of your customers moving from Unix to Windows? A number of very
high-profile customers of mine have tried to move to Windows and have
backed off on it. One that is very visible is Merrill Lynch. They are
no longer doing Windows; actually, they were trying to look at Linux,
and they're no longer doing Linux either, at least for now. They're
going to consolidate the number of vendors, but they're staying on
Unix.

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