SiliconBeat

Borland Software, a former Silicon Valley company of some 20 years, relocated last year to
Austin, Texas. Among the advantages it has found there is lower rent, as demonstrated in a
filing the company made Thursday.

The company signed a lease earlier this month for 45,000 square feet of office space in the building pictured here, where rent will begin at $1.58 per square foot per month. It was paying $2.50 per square foot for its space in Scotts Valley.

True, Borland had even cheaper rent for awhile when it sublet some of the space leased to Sun Microsytstems at City Center in Cupertino. For two years it paid $1.50 per square foot there, less than half of the amount Sun was on the hook for.

On Monday, less than two months after paying him the last of a $127,500 special bonus given for the expressed purpose of keeping him with with the company, Adaptec told its vice president of engineering, Manoj Goyal, that his “”position will be terminated” effective, well, that very day.

Goyal, who joined the company in May 2006 with a $50,000 signing bonus, gets nine-months severance, worth $191,250, plus the rest of the incentive bonus covering the last two quarters, which totaled $10,000. And his COBRA benefits paid through the end of the year.

One thing Goyal won’t get is much more time to exercise options that have already vested the way more favored executives in the valley often do. You know, when they are retained as consultants for an extra year or two. Goyal’s separation agreement specifically reminds him that has three months during which to exercise his vested options.

Fat chance. The shares that were vested as of the company’s last proxy are priced at $4.48. The last time Adaptec’s shares were that high was in early January 2007. They were trading Friday below $3 a share.

Exar, the fabless semiconductor company that has had four different people serve as chief executive over the last year and a half, named a new one Wednesday. Pedro “Pete” Rodriguez (pictured below), who serves on Exar’s board and has been chief marketing officer at semiconductor intellectual property supplier Virage Logic, will take over April 28.

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Hmmm. Is this advice that really needs to be given?

Evidently. ELT, a provider of online legal compliance training based in San Francisco has put out a self-described “funny but wise” tip sheet that offers “tough love” advice to the
graduating class of 2008, a group “celebrated for their technological savvy but woefully
unschooled in the customs of the corporation.”

In addition to the amusing but we’re assuming obvious suggestion that recent graduates just landing their first corporate jobs avoid the practice of rating their new bosses in the same way they have “professors, friends and random faces and bodies on social networking sites,” the tip sheet warns cubicle-dwelling worker newbies: Read the rest of this entry »

Back in February, we blogged that Richard Leza Jr. of Sierra Madre, who owns 2,600 shares of Rackable Systems, had asked the company to nominate himself and Steve Montoya of Los Gatos to its board of directors, according to an SEC filing. He also submitted a proposal to have shareholders approve executive pay.

On Tuesday, shareholders received more details of the nominations, along with Leza’s argument on behalf of his pay proposal in a proxy filed by Leza: Read the rest of this entry »

Nvidia filed (some) details of its newly approved Fiscal Year 2009 Variable Compensation Plan with the SEC Monday. Woohoo!

The filing spends a lot of words defining who was eligible to participate, how determinations of Actual Corporate Variable Cash Payments will be made, how Individual Variable Cash Payments will be determined (in theory), and so on. An example:

“Fifty percent (50%) of a Participant’s potential variable cash compensation will be allocated to the achievement of corporate targets (up to a maximum of 200% of the Participant’s corporate target award) and fifty percent (50%) will be allocated to the achievement of individual targets.”

However, our motivation to wade through the verbiage, much less make sense of it, evaporated after we read this one sentence: Read the rest of this entry »

Super Micro Computer, the San Jose server company that held its initial public offering last year, says got a letter from Nasdaq notifying the company that it “no longer fully complies” with the stock market’s requirements about how many independent directors serve on its board and audit committee following the death on March 25 of independent director Bruce Alexander.

Alexander, 63, had served on Super Micro’s board and audit committee since August 2006. Super Micro filed news of his death on April 10, the same day it lowered its guidance for the quarter just ended. The company said at the time it was forced to delay sales of $1.4 million from “”one significant project due to a delay in receipt of CPUs from a major provider.”

The company also said that it had yet to figure out the effect of a possible impairment charge related to short-term investments it held in auction rate securities.

The revolving door to the chief executive’s office at Openwave Systems speeded up with the announcement Monday that Robert Vrij resigned last week after little more than a year on the job. The move came little more than two weeks after Vrij announced that Openwave was moving into “Phase 2” of its “Product Portfolio Rationalization and Restructuring Strategy” that included 200 layoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

Shares of Sirf Technology Holdings surged Friday following the news that co-founder Diosdado Banato would take over as interim chief executive following the resignation of Michael Canning “effective immediately”, the company announced Thursday after regular stock trading closed.

Shares of Sirf, which held its initial public offering in in 2000 at $12 each. They plunged in February after the maker of chips used in global positioning systems forecast sales that fell short of Wall Street expectation, falling by more than half to $8.91. They closed Thursday at $5.47 and jumped to $6.34 around noon, PDT.

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Sharlene Abrams, former chief financial officer of Mercury Interactive, was indicted Thursday by a Grand Jury in San Francisco on one count of tax evasion and two counts of assisting in the preparation of false tax returns, according to the IRS.

The complaint alleges that Abrams “orchestrated the backdating of stock option exercise dates for herself and for the company’s chief executive, Amnon Landan, and its chief operating officer, Kenneth Klein.

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