Friday, October 17, 2008

The Mover

Van Siclen looks to score a goal at dynaTrace

By Jay Rizoli, Special to Mass High Tech

Unless you just haven’t been paying attention, you’ve probably heard the term “hockey mom” thrown around a time or two in the past several weeks. Hockey dads, on the other hand, seem to have gotten short shrift.

John Van Siclen is a member of that less frequently mentioned group — and although he isn’t running for office, he has joined a new team as chief executive officer at Waltham-based dynaTrace Software Inc.

A 30-year veteran of the computer systems and software fields, Van Siclen was a Southern California native who criss-crossed the country for school and work before landing in the Northeast.

“I went to Princeton, so I did something unusual for an LA kid,” said Van Siclen, who played hockey at The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., and then at Princeton University. But he wasn’t planning on staying, having set his sights on a business career and San Francisco. Sure enough, he ended up at Qume Corp. in Hayward, Calif.

“At the time it was the greatest high-tech story ever,” Van Siclen said of Qume, which was eventually acquired by Wyse Technology Inc. in the early 1990s. “That was my entry into high-tech.”

After moving back East to join the national sales team at Wyse, Van Siclen later held vice president positions at NetFrame Systems and Informix Software in California. “I was at Informix during the database wars, and it was exciting but a little crazy. But that’s where I cut my teeth on software.”

With software experience under his belt, Van Siclen also served as CEO at Interwoven Inc., Perspecta and — way back in Boston — Internet collaboration company Adesso Systems Inc.

“I had four boys, and all of them played ice hockey, and we knew that as they grew up they would end up in the Northeast,” said Van Siclen, who relocated the family but found himself looking for another job in July when Adesso closed its doors.

The CEO says he had what he describes as the good fortune of meeting Ben Nye at Bain Capital, which had funded dynaTrace, and decided that the Waltham developer of life-cycle application performance management products was “clearly a cut above.”

“It was a fundamental shift, people building business-critical apps on Java, becoming distributed and highly complex,” he said. “Old tools don’t work very well in this new environment, so there was a gap, and the question was who can best fill the gap. It’s also the type of software that, where there’s economic challenges and people have to do more with less, application performance management software is a must-have.”

And when he’s not pursuing that, the former Tiger captain is still chasing the puck: His current team was U.S. Senior Pond Hockey Champion this year.

 

Jay Rizoli is a freelance writer in Franklin.