Nielsen Leaves Oracle To Be Borland's CEO

The move is surprising given that Nielsen, a former Microsoft and BEA Systems executive, had joined Oracle as senior vice president of marketing and global sales support last spring. In that role, he led Oracle's growing middleware charge.

Nielsen's keynote will kick off Borland's 16th annual developers conference on Tuesday in San Francisco. Nielsen will be a familiar name and face to some old-time Borland watchers, since he helped Microsoft Access take share from Borland's Paradox and dBase PC databases years ago. Later, Neilsen headed up Microsoft&'s developer marketing.

Nielsen left Microsoft along with Adam Bosworth to form Crossgain and was promptly sued by Microsoft. Later on, Crossgain was acquired by BEA, where Nielsen became chief marketing officer.

The fact that Nielsen and Greg Maffei, who both joined Oracle in June, have left Oracle is raising eyebrows.

An Oracle insider said Nielsen and Maffei are close and that Nielsen had been brought in initially at Oracle to be chief marketing officer, a title he never formally received.

"We are extremely pleased to have Tod Nielsen join as our new chief executive officer," said Borland Chairman William Hooper in a statement.

"The board of directors was impressed with Mr. Nielsen's deep experience in our target markets, his proven leadership in market-leading software companies and the passion he brings as an individual to the need for better software development. We are confident that Borland, behind Mr. Nielsen's leadership, will push forward in its pursuit of Software Delivery Optimization, and continue to drive customer success."

Hooper also thanked Scott Arnold, who had been interim CEO since July 2005, when then-CEO Dale Fuller resigned over poor quarterly results.