Patti Hart named chairman/CEO of Excite@Home

(Telephony) Excite@Home has tabbed telecommunications veteran Patti Hart to take the helm of its financially floundering operations as chairman and CEO.

Hart most recently served as president/CEO for Telocity and previously held upper management positions with Sprint. She replaces George Bell, who had been expected to relinquish the CEO title and remain chairman but yesterday gave up both positions. Bell was the first chief executive at Excite, which @Home purchased in 1999, and drove the merger of the two entities.

“His passion and balanced energy made him one of the founding fathers of Internet media, a world that, with no small thanks to George’s vision, will live on when the current market conditions are a distant memory,” said Excite@Home executive vice president/chief financial officer Mark McEachen.

Those market conditions, however, are causing problems for Excite@Home right now. The company yesterday reiterated that it would continue to take steps to right its finances--more layoffs are possible--and divest media operations that “are not meeting our financial expectations and draining our cash resources,” McEachen said.

Selling those oeprations, McEachen added, “would directly impact the very identity of this company.”

Keith Kennebeck, an analyst with The Strategis Group, agreed that Excite@Home needs to do something with the media, or content, piece of its business.

”We’ve seen a tremendous decline in advertising revenues on line. The whole model with the broadband Internet--where you have more media-rich content that you can sell over a subscription basis or usage fees--never materialized,” he said. “They lost tremendous amounts of money doing that.”

That was Bell’s bailiwick, which indicates why Hart, with her operational background, is on board.

“Patti is an accomplished operational executive, and operational excellence is exactly what will ensure Excite@Home wins in the marketplace,” Meacham concluded.

Kennebeck said he does not hold a great deal of hope for a quick corporate turnaround.

“I don’t know if it’s the best business to be in,” he said. “What they do, in my eyes, is something anybody else could easily do.”

On the other hand, the MSOs--the company’s lifeline to cash flow--should continue to be there for Excite@Home, Kennebeck said.

“The MSOs need them to connect to the Internet … backbone, and they need to have that managed,” he said. Still, “it hasn’t proven to be a successful business so far. They’ve (Excite@Home) been rising in negative earnings for the past however many quarters they’ve been in business.”