The Bomber

David Peterschmidt. Air Force Vietnam vet. Helped build the first B-1 bomber. Software CEO. Led network security software-maker Securify and blew up database firm Sybase as COO. Took Inktomi from start-up to IPO to Yahoo in seven years. Now CEO of Openwave, watching wireless data explode.

My background has been a lot about growing companies. I got to Inktomi when it was nine Ph.D.s over the See's candy store on Shattuck Ave. in downtown Berkeley, Calif. In three years shipping products, it grew to almost $380 million in revenue. We took Sybase from $60 million in revenue to $1 billion between '91 and '96.

Today, Openwave owns a little under two-thirds of the world market for handset software (80% if you exclude Nokia and Qualcomm's handsets) and about 55% of the server software market for wireless carriers. We ship more units of software each month than Microsoft. So we're already sitting in a dominant position. We could do a lot more in China and Japan. But with such strong market share, it's all about us bringing new products to our installed base as well. Now that the company is out of recovery mode and in growth mode, you can switch strategies and start placing bets on where the market's going.

The company's going to look more like a software developer. I'm a software executive. The previous leadership came out of Cisco. A lot of our energy will go into developing new products, not necessarily new support services or more managed services, like running this stuff ourselves. Probably one of the first key hires you'll see me make is a CTO — the company's been without one for more than a year.

We went live a couple months ago in Portugal with video voicemail. You can download celebrities answering your phone, so you can have a video of Clint Eastwood or Britney Spears answering your video voicemail for you. We also put out an e-mail messaging product that contains both antivirus and antispam capabilities. Because wireless networks are becoming softswitch networks with programmable servers, there's a whole new set of security vulnerabilities that these networks have not had to deal with before. At Securify, we learned that you want to secure the network from the inside because the threat from internal problems is much more costly. We're coming out with a whole new set of integrated messaging products that include all the protection you need.