Corel taps Symantec exec as interim CEO

The embattled former CEO David Dobson will now hand over the reins of the Canadian-based software company to veteran IT executive Kris Hagerman, who joins Corel as interim chief from Symantec.

After running up a stock buyout bid from Corel's major shareholder, Vector Capital, Dobson quit his job at Corel late last month to take a position at an unidentified corportation. Dobson had been widely expected to stay on with Corel through June.

Similarly to Dobson, a 19-year IBM employee, Hagerman comes to Corel with a long background in company management.

But unlike Dobson, who worked chiefly in sales management in his earlier years, Hagerman has handled a number of other functions, too, including product management, strategic operations such as mergers and acquisitions, and the role of CEO.

On paper, at least, Hagerman seems to bring together Dobson's corporate orientation with the entrepreneural flair exhibited by Dobson's predecessor, Michael Cowpland. However, Cowpland left Corel amid an insider trading scandal during the year 2000.

Hagerman has also worked in a wide variety of industry segments. At Symantec, he was senior VP of the data center management business unit, where he overaw product management, engineering, alliances, and go-to-market functions.

Hagerman inherited the job at Symantec through its merger with Veritas in 2005. At Veritas, he served as executive VP of storage and server management.

Before moving to Veritas, Hagerman founded and headed up two successful start-ups: Affinity, developer of an Internet-based contextual merchandising platform, and BigBook, Inc., an Internet yellow pages service. He also worked in business development, consulting, finance, and sales and marketing jobs at Silicon Graphics, Morgan Stanley, Odyssey Research, and McKinsey & Co.

At Symantec, Hagerman appears to have placed a lot of focus on understanding customer needs, a trait that could well come in handy at Corel as the vendor struggles to build market share outside of its core business of graphics software.

Data center customers are "being asked consistently to do more with less," Hagerman says, for example, in a Symantec video still posted on the Web.

As the volume of data and applications keeps skyrocketing, while resources remain flat, "complexity in the data center is running out of control," according to Hagerman.