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Leighton will take over from current CEO Paul Sagan on Jan. 1. Sagan will remain on Akamai’s board of directors. Leighton was one of Akamai’s founders in 1998, and has been responsible for much of its technology strategy.

At this point, it’s worth remembering what it is that Akamai does. I interviewed Leighton in September. He summed up the company’s mission like so:

“Our mission is to make the Internet work the way you’d want it to for business. We want it to be really fast, really reliable, really secure, really scalable and really efficient. And we do that as a service, and the way we do that is with a platform of more than 100,000 of our servers located in more than 1,000 places around the world. But they’re also inside more than 1,100 different networks. And the platform is extended with software that lives on tens of millions of client machines to help with the delivery of software and the playing of video and the fast delivery of business applications.”

It’s also pretty active in the area of Web security, as he described in the same interview:

“We are the largest consumer of bandwidth on the Internet, and in some networks, we’re the majority of their bandwidth. By delivering that bandwidth from the edge, we take a lot of the load off the customers’ core infrastructure, which is what allows the Internet to grow into scale. But we defend a lot of the major Web sites against attacks. In the case of a denial-of-service attack, we’ll provide the customer with the volume needed to defend against the attack. In the case of more nefarious attacks, where people are trying to sneak in and change content or trying to take control of the site somehow, we’ll filter out those attacks before they get anywhere near the data center …”

Groupon’s board meeting today turned out to be short on action, despite a clearly growing rift between company co-founder Andrew Mason and a number of directors.

In other words, Andrew Mason is keeping the CEO job — for now, anyway.

Groupon spokesman Paul Taaffe told AllThingsD that today’s meeting concluded without incident, there was no change of leadership — i.e. replacing Mason — and that it’s business as usual. Mason’s performance, though, was a topic at the gathering.

Nonetheless, Taaffe said exactly nothing, too: “The board and management team are focused on the performance of the company and they are all working together with heads down to achieve Groupon’s objectives.”

Which is what he had to say, since there was nothing to say. More to come on exactly what nothing means.

As AllThingsD had previously reported and Groupon CEO Andrew Mason confirmed in an onstage interview, there’s a bit of mishegas going on at the top echelons of the daily deals company over performance issues.

Today, the board is meeting in Chicago, a gathering that should be tense, given the rift between Mason and his co-founders, Groupon Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, as well as worries from other directors about how the company has fared over the last year under Mason’s leadership.

Badly, if stock price is the judge (and it is), with shares down more than 80 percent since its IPO. Only recently did the shares move up on news of an investment by Tiger Global Management and then, ironically, on news this week of Mason’s possible ouster as top exec.

Tricia Duryee has outlined the many other issues the board faces, with the key issue being whether Mason is the man to fix them.

Until we know what conclusion the board comes to on this question, here are the four likeliest outcomes:

Mason quits: The fall-on-the-sword option is simple — Mason might decide that, for the good of the company and to end questions about him, he moves aside and hands over the reins. Mason himself cleverly addressed this in that interview at the Business Insider Ignition conference by noting that he would fire himself if he thought that was the best choice.

While a clever turn of phrase. Mason cannot actually fire himself — that is the board’s job. And while he, too, is on the board, he would have to recuse himself from any firing of himself.

So, his only real option in this scenario would be to quit. But will he? No one knows but him.

On one hand, in my experience, Mason is thoughtful enough to want to do so if he thought it was the right thing; on the other, after numerous discussions with him over the years, I think he does believe he is the right leader for Groupon.

Mason is fired: By the board, of course. This would be a drastic action and, to my mind, very unlikely. It would require a majority of the board and a very aggressive effort on the part of Mason’s critics. It would also damage the company by tossing out one of its key founders, who is arguably Groupon’s heart and soul and very much its creative spirit.

Firing founders and co-founder squabbles are always problematic (see Twitter) and usually never a good thing.

Mason moves to a new job and a new CEO is named: This seems like one reasonable course of action if cool heads prevail. That’s because if you talk to any significant Groupon investor — and I have talked to a lot — there is serious doubt about the company’s business model already and very little support for Mason himself.

But that does not mean he is not very valuable as a figure at the company, especially around product and culture. Could Mason take a key role in that area as did Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google or Pierre Omidyar of eBay? Most definitely.

Mason keeps his job but gets lots of support: Another very viable option, by adding even more executive heft to the novice CEO. Groupon has already done that with the elevation of Kal Raman as COO, but it is still not enough. Mason needs a lot more help if he is to succeed, including from independent board members. Good candidates there are former AOL exec Ted Leonsis (and he knows from crisis), investment exec Mellody Hobson and American Express CFO Daniel Henry.

The problem for this option is that it puts an enormous amount of pressure on Mason to perform and does not remove the rancor between him and Lefkofsky and Keywell. If he bests his board detractors, he is going to have to succeed. Call it the put-up-or-shut-up option, but the onus will be squarely on Mason in this scenario. Which is just where it should be.

There is one final option, of course: Nothing will happen and Groupon will continue to stumble forward with a lot of questions lingering about its clearly wounded CEO and disgruntled board dynamics.

And, oh yes, they all have to work together to fix the business and restore investor confidence. There’s that.

More to come soon, obvi.

Until then and speaking of Illinois, here is the “Wayne’s World” version of the classic “Ballroom Blitz”:

Kara Swisher reported yesterday that several Groupon board members have been considering replacing Mason with a new CEO.

Today, in an appearance at Business Insider’s Ignition conference, Mason admitted to the audience that his performance was under review.

“The stock is down 80 percent since the IPO a year ago, so it would be weird if they weren’t discussing if I was the right guy,” he said. “That’s their chief responsibility, and they have discussed it in the past.”

At a regularly scheduled meeting tomorrow, the company’s directors, who do have that fiduciary responsibility to Groupon’s shareholders, will be asking the tough question as to whether Mason should continue running the daily deals company, or if it makes sense to bring on someone more experienced.

If it were up to Mason, he’d stay: “If I ever thought I wasn’t the right guy, I’d be the first one to fire myself.”

While at the helm over the past four years, the co-founder has accomplished some pretty awesome milestones — Groupon became the fastest-growing company ever, and had the largest IPO since Google went public. In that time, the thirtysomething Mason has transformed from the office comedian and prankster with uncombed locks to someone who more gracefully conducts himself on conference calls and wears suits to public appearances. While onstage today, he said that the CEO needs to be someone who can attract a strong team, choose a winning strategy and then execute against that strategy.

“I’m flattered that people think that removing me would flatten these bumps,” he added.

Still, as many companies and boards realize, it takes a different skill set to grow a company than it does to run one at enormous scale, and whether the founder is the right fit to guide an organization through its next phase is not always clear. Does Groupon need an Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, who can be brought in to work closely with the company’s founders, or is Mason a visionary, like Mark Zuckerberg, who can remain successful if surrounded by a few heavy-duty lieutenants?

There is no denying that, over the past year, there have been some major management missteps, which Mason will ultimately have to take responsibility for as the chief executive.

Here are five of them that the board will likely be looking at tomorrow as part of its evaluation as to whether Mason should stay or go:

1. Accounting: Never Groupon’s strong suit; the daily deals company has struggled with its books since before it went public. Prior to its IPO, it was forced to restate revenue and also had to dump a controversial accounting metric that made the company look more profitable than it was. After it went public, the problems continued. Following its first quarterly report, Groupon had to restate its earnings to take into account higher-than-expected returns last year during the holidays.
2. Management turmoil: Earlier this month, the company finally appointed a COO after the seat sat vacant for more than a year. The company picked Kal Raman, who was promoted from SVP of global sales and operations, a job he was essentially doing anyway. This is the third attempt at having an operations guru, after burning through two others in 2011. Neither Margo Georgiadis, who came from Google, or Rob Solomon, who came from Yahoo, lasted long.
3. Maintaining margins: This one is a big deal. Groupon was deemed the fast-growing company because of its tremendous top-line growth, but the real reason the company was considered so valuable was because of its high margins. Local restaurants and merchants were willing to pay big dollars to get new customers in the door. But as sales have started to plateau, the company has started to augment its original business with the sale of physical goods, which has inherently thinner margins. The business is also entering extremely competitive waters where well-established players like Walmart and Amazon operate.
4. European troubles: Part of the company’s promise when it went public was world domination. Groupon was on track to become a household name across the globe by replicating its popular U.S. business model everywhere. But Europe has underperformed. Mason has admitted that Groupon was too focused on capturing market share in those markets and subsequently let innovation and customer and merchant satisfaction slide. As a result, Groupon’s gross bookings revenue have been severely affected.
5. Continued growth: All of the previous issues are well known, but the big challenge going forward will be for Groupon to keep evolving and finding ways for both merchants and customers to continue coming back. Groupon has identified a two-part approach. One includes the sale of Groupon Goods. The other bet is to build more tools and services to make local merchants happy. So far, those tools have included online scheduling software, mobile payments and point-of-sale hardware. As designed, these services are not expected to generate huge amounts of revenue, but rather to continue merchant interest in buying daily deals.

It is a clearly troubled record, and a tough road for a novice CEO to handle. But perhaps the most damning sign is the stock price. While it has risen recently, after Tiger Global Management bought a big stake — and went up almost 5 percent since news of Mason’s possible ouster was reported here yesterday — shares are still off more than 84 percent since Groupon’s IPO a year ago.

In other words, for Mason, it’s a long way down.

People are going to wonder if Intel’s board is forcing Otellini out. They’ll point to Intel’s mandatory retirement age of 65. Otellini is only 62, and his predecessor Craig Barrett retired from the CEO job at 65 or 66. But apparently there’s no hard-and-fast rule at Intel. The legendary Andy Grove, the company’s third employee, served as its CEO from 1987 until 1997, retiring closer to age 61.

But the bigger problems stem from the emergence of a fundamentally new computing environment over the last five years. When Otellini was promoted into the CEO job in 2005, Intel essentially set much of the computing industry’s agenda.

It used to be that some of the biggest computing companies in the world outsourced their research and development to Intel. PCs from Dell and Gateway and Compaq were all the same internally, their insides designed by Intel, with only marginal differences on the outside. When Intel made seemingly innocuous choices to the designs of their chips, those choices had a way of rippling throughout an entire industry.

Intel is hands-down the best company in the world at building chips, and also at managing the jaw-droppingly complex accounting and logistics that go with that. But it has largely failed to sell its chips in a meaningful way into the new hot computing products of the moment: Tablets and smartphones.

Apple’s iPad — the most popular tablet in the world — doesn’t use an Intel chip, but one designed by Apple and manufactured by Samsung under contract. The same is true of Apple’s iPhone. And none of the successful Android tablet computers have Intel chips in them. Some smartphones do, but only a few.

In practically all of those cases, the chips inside these devices are derived from designs created by ARM, the British firm that licenses its designs to scores of other companies. In turn, those companies build their own chips — with some of their own custom design work — around the ARM-designed core. I’ve always likened an ARM core design to a recipe for a basic cake, around which a baker can then add his own enhancements like frosting, sprinkles and other adornments.

And it wouldn’t be so bad, if the ARM-based chips weren’t also invading Intel’s home turf, the notebook PC. Nvidia and Qualcomm are among the companies that have parlayed ARM-based chips into notebooks running a variant of Windows called WindowsRT, and while the jury is still out on these machines, they are the machines — Microsoft’s Surface is just one example — that are getting the buzz as Windows 8 has come to market in the last month.

In an interview with AllThingsD’s Ina Fried earlier last month, Otellini seemed dismissive of the threat apparently posed by ARM-based tablets, and was hopeful for touch-enabled convertible and traditional notebook PCs: “I happen to believe that the standalone tablet is not the form factor people will (move) to,” Otellini said at the time. “The fact everybody is now fitting tablets with keyboards suggests that real buyers have come to the same conclusion.”

However, it’s not that Otellini’s tenure at Intel hasn’t been a largely successful one. The company weathered numerous challenges on his watch. In 2005 and 2006, there was a big challenge from rival Advanced Micro Devices in the market for server chips. When AMD entered the market with a 64-bit server chip that extended the compatibility of x86-based computing into the 64-bit realm, it flew in the face of the Itanium architecture toward which Intel had hoped to push the world.

AMD’s approach with its Opteron server chips proved more successful and, for a time, it gave Intel competitive fits that eventually forced it to embrace an approach that mirrored that of AMD. The Itanium chip, recent legal dramas aside, has become something of a footnote in computing history.

Intel also faced down numerous legal guns. Its “Intel Inside” marketing program — in which it underwrote a portion of the marketing costs of its PC-making customers — was the target of a 2005 antitrust lawsuit brought by AMD. It was revealed in pretrial filings that sometimes those marketing dollars made the difference between being profitable and losing money. Intel never admitted wrongdoing, but in 2009 it settled AMD’s complaint at a gathering of the two companies’ highest managers in Maui. It also paid AMD $1.25 billion.

Antitrust had Intel in its sights, as well. In 2009, European Union regulators slapped Intel with a $1.45 billion fine, its largest ever against any company in the world. Intel is still fighting that fine.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission wasn’t far behind. Arguing that not only AMD, but Nvidia had been harmed by Intel’s behavior, it sued Intel in 2010, and secured a settlement later that year. A $1.5 billion settlement with Nvidia followed last year.

“Intel had a good run under Otellini’s leadership. He survived AMD’s Opteron, the shift to 64-bit computing, and a huge legal onslaught,” says Patrick Moorhead, a former AME executive and head of research firm MoorInsights and Strategy. “The biggest missing piece of his tenure was mobility success.”

Here’s Intel’s announcement:

Intel CEO Paul Otellini to Retire in May
SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–
Intel Corporation today announced that the company’s president and CEO, Paul Otellini, has decided to retire as an officer and director at the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting in May, starting an orderly leadership transition over the next six months. Otellini’s decision to retire will bring to a close a remarkable career of nearly 40 years of continuous service to the company and its stockholders.
“Paul Otellini has been a very strong leader, only the fifth CEO in the company’s great 45-year history, and one who has managed the company through challenging times and market transitions,” said Andy Bryant, chairman of the board. “The board is grateful for his innumerable contributions to the company and his distinguished tenure as CEO over the last eight years.”
“I’ve been privileged to lead one of the world’s greatest companies,” Otellini said. “After almost four decades with the company and eight years as CEO, it’s time to move on and transfer Intel’s helm to a new generation of leadership. I look forward to working with Andy, the board and the management team during the six-month transition period, and to being available as an advisor to management after retiring as CEO.”
The board of directors will conduct the process to choose Otellini’s successor and will consider internal and external candidates for the job.
In addition, the company also announced that the board has approved the promotion of three senior leaders to the position of executive vice president: Renee James, head of Intel’s software business; Brian Krzanich, chief operating officer and head of worldwide manufacturing; and Stacy Smith, chief financial officer and director of corporate strategy.
During Otellini’s tenure as CEO — from the second quarter of 2005 through the third quarter of 2012 — Intel:
Generated cash from operations of $107 billion
Made $23.5 billion in dividend payments
Increased the quarterly dividend 181 percent from $0.08 to $0.225
From the end of 2005 through the end of 2011, Intel achieved record revenue and net income. During this period, annual revenue grew from $38.8 billion to $54 billion, while annual earnings-per-share grew from $1.40 to $2.39.
In addition to financial performance, Intel, under Otellini’s leadership, achieved notable successes in areas of strategic importance. During this period, the company:
Transformed operations and the cost structure for long-term growth
Achieved breakthrough innovations, including High-K/Metal gate and now 3-D Tri-gate transistors; and dramatic improvement in energy efficiency of Intel processors
Reinvented the PC with Ultrabook™ devices
Greatly expanded business partnerships and made strategic acquisitions that expanded Intel’s presence in security, software and mobile communications
Delivered the first smartphones and tablets for sale with Intel inside
Grew the vast network of cloud-based computing built on Intel products

Time to step up: Hiring the VP of Sales
For the technology founder-led companies we love to back at Andreessen Horowitz, recognizing the need to “hire different” is particularly important when the company is transitioning from initial product development mode into sales mode. If you’re an a16z founder, you’re very likely an engineer or computer scientist. Virtually all of your early hires will have been engineers or developers. While you’ve hopefully hired people who are smarter than you, they may not be that different from you. Now you’ve got a product, it’s time to hire a VP of Sales. Prepare to hire different — very different!

A typical sales culture is different from a typical engineering culture in almost every aspect — from personality types to values to dress code to working hours. Introducing sales DNA is highly likely to clash with your engineering culture. That prospect will feel quite uncomfortable, but is absolutely critical if you’re serious about building a real company.

While on an intellectual level you may recognize the need to hire an executive who’s different, it can be really hard to act on it in practice. Most of us are naturally more comfortable with people who are like us. If as a first-time tech founder CEO you feel entirely comfortable with that VP of Sales candidate, she’s probably not the right one. The right candidate will feel risky to you from the cultural fit point of view. So, you’ll want to know what the team thinks. However, the interview feedback from the team is likely to make you even more uncomfortable. Here are some real examples of technical team feedback from interviews of highly qualified sales candidates:

“I’m worried that he’s rough around the edges and would clash with our people.”

“His tone was very A-type salesman.”

“I fear for the culture if she were to come aboard.”

“He had very limited understanding of our product.”

“I don’t think he has much idea of what we do and how we do it.”

“I think he could generate massive revenue, but he’d destroy the culture by building a Salesforce-type sales organization.”

So, hiring the right sales leader will involve not just overruling your own emotions, but rejecting the strongly held opinions of several members of your team. Remember, you’re not recruiting her for her knowledge of the company, but for her knowledge of the outside world. As my partner Ben puts it: “Generally, you want product leaders with superior internal knowledge (knowledge of the code base, knowledge of the culture, knowledge of the people). With sales people, it’s the opposite — they need to have external knowledge (knowledge of customers, purchasing processes, customer org structures, customer cultures…).”

Two-way street
While you and the team are trying to evaluate this unfamiliar animal and assess whether you can handle it in your habitat, don’t forget she’s evaluating you, too. Just as you’re asking yourselves things like, “Will this person destroy our culture?”, she’s asking herself, “Are these guys serious about building a business, and will I get the support I need to build a winning sales organization? Will this CEO have my back with the company and the board?” She won’t need everyone’s buy-in on day one — a good VP of sales will earn that over time — but she will need full and sustained support from you and the board to put in place the processes, people and sales culture that can transform a great product organization into a great business. This is your time to lead. The way you handle the recruiting process will speak volumes about whether or not you’re the leader she wants to bet her career on.

Hiring different at Opsware
At Loudcloud/Opsware, we went though three VPs of sales in the first four years of the company. Each one of them was well liked and an excellent fit with the culture, but not one of them was able to consistently hit our quarterly sales targets. By 2003, looking for our fourth sales leader in as many years, we met a guy named Mark Cranney. He seemed very well qualified, and he gave us several pages of references to call if we wanted proof. However, virtually everyone who interviewed him had similar feedback: “He might be a great sales guy, but there’s no way he’d fit here. Way too risky.”

Ben Horowitz and I called every one of his references. They confirmed that Mark was an exceptional sales leader who had consistently achieved great results. But could we take the risk of introducing such a culturally different executive into Opsware’s strong culture? Only Ben and I seemed to think so. We hired him.

Hiring Mark, and the many sales professionals he added to our ranks, was indeed a shock to the system. It created significant tension in the company at times, as sales culture met engineering culture. It was a tension that we badly needed — a healthy tension between the demanding outside world of customer needs and competitive pressures and our sheltered inside world of PRDs and predictable development schedules. Mark was unreasonable — he told it like it was, not how we wanted it to be. It stretched every part of the company, from engineering to marketing to legal to finance. Gradually, we became a more customer-driven organization and we started making our numbers. Over time, cultural discomfort shifted to mutual respect and even to affection. In the years that followed, we won hundreds of the world’s most demanding enterprise IT accounts, met their needs with market-leading products, outpaced a brutally tough competitor, and grew bookings and revenues at a rapid pace. For Opsware, hiring different was the key to unlocking the company’s true potential.

The courage to challenge
Strong leaders don’t just hire people who are smarter than them, or different from them. They also look for people who have the courage to challenge them, and they create a culture that encourages people to do so. Ironically, being surrounded by lots of smart people makes it harder to speak up, particularly for more junior team members. “If all of these smart people think X makes sense, who am I to challenge them?” The more senior you are, the less likely you are to be challenged, and the more you will have to work to encourage it. “She’s the CEO — she must know what she’s doing. I’m not going to question it.” I don’t know about you, but if I were the emperor, I’d want someone to tell me before I walked down the street naked. Like the emperor, you won’t hear diverse opinions if you don’t actively solicit them — and resist the temptation to slaughter them with your ferocious intellect the minute they’re expressed!

At Andreessen Horowitz, we’re fortunate to have a lot of very smart people, both more senior and more junior, around the table when we talk about companies we’ve just met. It takes real courage to speak up when everyone else seems to love (or hate) some opportunity we’ve just seen, but we particularly want to hear that different view. We work hard to encourage people to speak up. The best investments are often controversial, and vigorous debate leads to better investment decisions.

The same applies to business decisions. As CEO, it’s your job to make the call. Having people around the table with the background and the courage to be controversial makes it more likely you’ll make the right one. As your company grows, recognize that you’ll need to hire different, and strive to build a culture that encourages and rewards constructive challenge and diversity of opinion.

John O’Farrell is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He sits on the boards of Factual, GoodData, ShoeDazzle, Solum and Tiny Speck, and he works with portfolio companies on partnering, strategic transactions and global expansion. John’s blog can be read at http://john.a16z.com/.

That’s essentially the message CEO Dick Costolo gave onstage at the OpenCoSF conference on Thursday evening. He spoke to a crowd about how his company has evolved by being situated in the Bay Area, one of the world’s premier tech and innovation hubs.

“Twitter is a city company,” Costolo said. “It’s gritty like the city.”

This is, in part, due to its relatively new headquarters situated in the mid-Market Street neighborhood of San Francisco, an area typically known for its rough-and-tumble atmosphere (to put it nicely). Unlike many other SF-based technology companies that opt for locations in the SoMa district — an area rife with start-ups and shared workspaces — Twitter’s HQ is considered a bastion of development in a sketchy neighborhood.

As of today, the new home base houses 1,200 of the company’s 1,400 employees worldwide, with Twitter occupying floors seven, eight and nine of the large building at 1355 Market St. Costolo says the company isn’t going anywhere for awhile; it has options on other floors in the building, which means more than enough space to scale up as Twitter continues to recruit new engineering and sales talent.

“We’ve got employees from all parts of the Bay coming to work here — from Marin County, where I live, to the East Bay and the Peninsula,” Costolo said. Unlike Google, Facebook and many other big tech companies situated 40 miles south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley, Twitter’s centralized location makes it easier for commuting and living across different parts of the city.

That location also plays into the company’s internal culture, “allowing flexibility on how people work,” Costolo said. Instead of driving for 40 minutes back from the Valley to a San Francisco residence, a Twitter employee can work eight hours in the office, bike home for dinner, then turn back around and work at Twitter HQ until 10 pm.

One possibility would have been to take the Google route — splitting the company between the Valley and the city. But that, Costolo said, would have impacted the company in ways he didn’t want. “We needed a contiguous space, and didn’t want to divvy up the culture,” he said. Were they to have split the company like that, Twitter “might as well have split engineers in San Francisco and sales teams in New York.”

Indeed, Twitter does have a small New York presence, with sales staff and a burgeoning engineering team flanking the East Coast. But most of the company is still situated in California.

It wasn’t a completely smooth decision to keep Twitter in San Francisco, though. The company went back and forth with the city for some time, due to certain San Francisco tax codes that would have required Twitter to pay big bucks to stay in SF. Ultimately, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to give certain companies — like Twitter — payroll tax exemptions if they located in “struggling areas” of the city.

Hence the new digs, and Twitter’s “gritty” vibe.

Big Blue made the announcement today after the close of markets in New York. IBM shares are ticking up after hours, rising to $207.32, after closing at $204.98 during the regular session.

Ginni Rometty is a well-respected executive who took over as CEO on the first day of this year. She recently topped Fortune Magazine’s list of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business,” though it was Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer who made the cover. Rometty is generally credited with doing the heavy lifting to get PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting fully integrated following its $3.5 billion acquisition by IBM in 2002.

Earlier this year, Rometty was also an unwilling figure in a national debate over Augusta National Golf Club’s longtime policy of excluding women from memberships. The complication was that the club had always offered an honorary membership to the CEO of IBM. The stories caused a brief national kerfuffle that prompted both President Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to weigh in. Ultimately, Augusta changed its policy and offered memberships to two women, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Rometty’s appointment also marks an end to the IBM career of Sam Palmisano, who will remain as a special consultant until he officially retires on Dec. 1. His tenure will be remembered for, among other things, a 125 percent increase in IBM’s share price and for the then-controversial decision to sell IBM’s PC business to China’s Lenovo.

And while this is probably not the moment to bring it up, it bears mentioning that Rometty is 55, and IBM’s policy has typically been that CEOs retire around the time they turn 60. However, there’s nothing saying that practice can’t or won’t be changed.

Anyway, here’s IBM’s official announcement.

Virginia M. Rometty Elected IBM Chairman

ARMONK, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– The IBM (IBM) board of directors today elected Virginia M. Rometty chairman of the board, effective October 1, 2012. Mrs. Rometty succeeds Samuel J. Palmisano, who is stepping down from the board effective October 1, 2012.

Mr. Palmisano will become Senior Adviser to the company until he retires on December 1, 2012. As of October 1, 2012, Mrs. Rometty’s title will be IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer.

Mrs. Rometty, 55, is currently IBM’s president and chief executive officer. She succeeded Mr. Palmisano as IBM’s ninth CEO in January of this year, after holding senior leadership positions in IBM’s services, sales, strategy and marketing units. Mrs. Rometty led the successful integration of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting — the largest acquisition in professional services history, building a team of more than 100,000 business consultants and services experts. She became a director of IBM in January.

Mr. Palmisano, 61, became IBM chief executive officer in 2002 and chairman of the board in 2003. During his tenure, IBM transformed its product and services portfolio, exiting commoditizing businesses, including PCs, printers and hard disk drives, and greatly increasing investments in analytics, cloud computing and other high-value businesses and technologies. He has overseen the transformation of IBM from a multinational into a globally integrated enterprise. During Mr. Palmisano’s tenure as CEO, IBM created over $100 billion of total shareholder value.

And, as usually happens when a new CEO comes to a company, there has been a lot of upheaval among the senior management ranks at AMD. The latest is CFO Thomas Seifert, who resigned in order to pursue other interests.

Sources familiar with the situation say that Seifert, 48, is interested in finding a job where he has a shot at being CEO. He served briefly as acting CEO at AMD after the surprise resignation of then-CEO Dirk Meyer 19 months ago. Read was named CEO after a search that dragged on for seven months.

As I said, some upheaval is natural. But the departures from AMD are starting to pile up — the confirmed exits, counting Meyer and Seifert, are now 26 by my count, and I’m sure I’m missing some. Among them is a name not yet reported but confirmed by AllThingsD: Chris Cloran, VP in charge of AMD’s Client business — “client,” in this case, refers to PCs for both businesses and consumers — who left the company late last week, though his status on LinkedIn is not yet updated to reflect that fact.

Some of the people were fired, caught up in a reduction in force which Read ordered late last year. But most left on their own power, bound for jobs at places like Samsung, Synaptics and Calxeda.

Now, it’s not as if there haven’t been any key hires at AMD. Just last month, the company brought on Jim Keller, the former head chip designer at Apple. And last year it hired its CIO away from Hewlett-Packard. And there have been new hires in the graphics business. It also named Jack Harding, the chairman of eSilicon, as a director on its board. So there are some new people offsetting some of the departures, but the number of recent departures listed all together — all of them having taken place since Meyer was pushed out last year — is pretty stunning.

It’s worth nothing that AMD shares fell by more than 7 percent, or 30 cents, on the news of the CFO’s resignation. It’s been a rough ride for AMD shareholders over the course of the last year. Before Meyer’s ouster, the shares were trading above $9. On Monday they closed at $4.01, down 56 percent. The stock only fell further — another 7.5 percent — in after-hours trading, as markets reacted to word of Seifert’s departure.

Meyer’s 2011 ouster is said to have been precipitated by an argument with the board of directors over the direction of the company. Chairman Bruce Claflin, a former 3Com CEO, is said to have quarreled with Meyer over the need to invest heavily in chips for mobile devices, like tablets. Meyer is said to have resisted, arguing that AMD needed another year of improved stability before investing in any significant new product directions. Claflin disagreed, and pushed for a more aggressive stance in light of advances by Nvidia into mobile PCs and tablets.

Update: As of noon ET, AMD shares have fallen on the New York Stock Exchange by 32 cents, or nearly 8 percent, to $3.69.

Here’s what I’m sure is only a partial list, gathered from various news stories, LinkedIn profiles and chats with people familiar with AMD’s operations:

Bob Rivet, Executive VP and COO
Nigel Dessau, Chief Marketing Officer
Marty Seyer, Senior VP of Corporate Strategy
Patrick Moorhead, Corporate VP, Strategy
Patrick Patla, VP and General Manager, Opteron unit
Jim Mergard, VP and Chief Engineer
David Wang, Corporate VP Products Group
Ben Williams, Corporate VP and General Manager of Asia Pacific
Dave Kroll, VP for Global Communications
Jon Volkmann, Corporate VP and Marketing Fellow
Jeff VerHeul, Corporate VP of Platform Solutions Engineering
Bob Feldstein, VP of Strategic Development
Chris Cloran, General Manager, Processor Division
Andy Tseng, Corporate VP and General Manager, Taiwan
Frank Lee, Senior VP for Greater China
Anand Mandapati, Senior Director of Engineering
Carrell Killebrew, Director of Products Group
Eric Demers, Graphics CTO
Godfrey Cheng, Director of Client Technologies
Rick Bergman, General Manager, Products Group,
Gamal Refai-Ahmed, Senior Architect, ATI
John Bruno, System Architect, Office of the Chief Engineer
Paul Teich, Senior Fellow Corporate Strategy for Servers
John Fruehe, Director of Server Product Marketing
Emilio Ghilardi, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer

Facebook needs its spiritual leader and chief innovator in a hoodie. But it doesn’t need him as CEO, placating investors in a collared shirt. There are plenty of people who could manage the Facebook business.

– Reuters blogger John Abell, writing about Mark Zuckerberg after Facebook’s first earnings report

The company is announcing a bunch of important news today. The big piece is that its application is coming out of beta testing and is now ready for general availability; along with that, it is disclosing some of its customers — and one of them, at least, is kind of cool.

The second is that it has hired Phil Wilmington as its new president and COO. He has been executive chairman since January. Wilmington was President at OutlookSoft, the company that he and Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe ran together — Gheorghe was CEO CTO — before it was acquired by SAP in 2007. Before OutlookSoft, Wilmington had been co-president at PeopleSoft until it was taken over by Oracle.

You’ll remember that this is one of several start-ups aiming to attack the juicy vein of enterprise software that’s currently dominated by the Oracles and SAPs of the world, and more often than not by applications that tend to run on-premise. And naturally, like so many other upstart business software outfits these days, it runs it all in the cloud, or more precisely, the “software-as-a-service” model made so popular by outfits like Salesforce.com and Workday.

The unsexy way to describe it is Enterprise Performance Management, and it’s the stuff that businesses use to plan their finances and operations. Over a pair of lunches last year, Gheorghe explained something that sounded a lot like what all the other so-called “business intelligence” applications in the cloud are trying to do. His argument then, and now, is that while lots of applications give you good information, few help guide you to a decision or a course of business action. Gheorghe says that, in Tidemark, these applications have been “reimagined.”

One key problem holding it up is that data from one side of the business doesn’t get mashed up with data from another. What happens then is that enterprising executives try to do it themselves in Excel spreadsheets, which, even if you’re really good at building spreadsheets, isn’t optimal.

Tidemark’s play is to deliver real-time business data that has been adjusted for risk and assembled in consideration of all the strategic, financial and operational forecasting that has already been done. It also runs on the iPad or any other tablet or smartphone that supports HTML5, which shouldn’t be surprising anymore, but still is to me.

Those three applications Gheorghe told me about last October are ready for general availability: Metrics Management and Management Reporting basically answers the “what’s happening?” question about a business with a more sophisticated “what is happening and why?” kind of approach; Enterprise Planning is a classic budgeting and forecasting app; and Profitability Monitoring — by product, customer and channel — tells you precisely which aspects of your business are profitable or losing money.

Here’s the part where it’s time to name the customers. One CIO told me that he got his CEO excited to use Tidemark in a bar. That sounds a little sketchy, until you realize that the company is Pabst Brewing. CIO Ben Haines said that in the beer business, you sell via third parties. In this case, there are about 600 different distributors that it does business with, and all of them send data back to Pabst in different ways. “It’s all disparate, and we try to make sense of it and try to figure out what’s going on,” Hains said. Then there’s data from Nielsen covering what consumers are saying and doing, and then there’s shipping data coming from individual breweries. The challenge has been to mix them all up and make them useful. Not easy, that.

Haines had built out systems running IBM’s Cognos, but said that it can be years before it’s up and running and tuned enough to deliver data you can actually use. “We don’t have that kind of time,” he said. “Most people run their companies on spreadsheets because their business intelligence applications haven’t kept up.” It used to be that Pabst would have generated about 400 different reports that different execs would have to have, and people might read them, they might not, and when they did, they had to hunt for the data they needed to do their jobs.

One night in a meeting at a bar — it is a beer company, after all — Tidemark execs whipped out an iPad and showed Pabst President John Coleman all of the company’s live data at a glance, in a dashboard. He was an instant fan.

Other customers being named today are also sort of cool. One is CEC Entertainment, which is better known as the company behind the 550-store Chuck E. Cheese pizza chain. The other is Platinum Hospitality Management, a manager and operator of mid-market hotels that works with Hilton and Marriott, among others.

Tidemark also has some strong financial backing from venture capital firms, including Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, which invested $6.3 million back when Tidemark was still a stealth start-up called Proferi. Later rounds included Redpoint Ventures with Greylock and AH also participating, and as of January, Tidemark had raised a combined $35.5 million. Ben Horowitz of AH is a director. Aneel Bhusri, the former PeopleSoft CEO turned Greylock Partner who is also co-CEO at the soon-to-be-public Workday led Tidemark’s A round. Dave Duffield, another former PeopleSoft CEO and the other co-CEO of Workday, also invested in that round.

Maple Story

Nexon confirms to AllThingsD  that effective Sept. 1, Min Kim, Nexon’s SVP of live games, will be replacing Daniel Kim. The announcement was made in front of the company’s 200 U.S. employees this afternoon.

A spokesman says Daniel Kim will continue working with the company from the Korea office in a yet-to-be-determined role, and is looking forward to being back with his family after commuting between the two continents since 2009.

Daniel Kim

“It’s been part of a long-term plan,” Min Kim said, in an exclusive interview. “This has been overdue. He’s done a great job and has positioned it well for growth. After three years here, he’ll be back with family and make up for lost time.”

Min Kim joined Nexon in 2003, and moved to Los Angeles in 2005 to help open the U.S. office.

In his new role, he will oversee the company’s free-to-play PC games, including MapleStory, Dragon Nest and Combat Arms. The games, which are monetized through virtual goods, are available directly from the company’s Web site, and more recently, through the Steam platform. As part of the role, Min Kim will not be managing the company’s social and mobile game efforts, which are based out of the company’s Korea offices.

Awareness about the Japanese company has increased dramatically over the past year after it raised $1.2 billion in an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange just days before Zynga went public, raising a similar amount.

Min Kim

Min Kim said the company has come a long way since first launching operations in the U.S. At the time, he said free-to-play was a “freaky thing going on in Asia, and was never going to happen here.” He said the company had to work hard to prove that not only would customers be willing to play games online, but they would also be willing to pay for virtual items. In 2007, Min Kim spearheaded the effort to develop gift cards that enabled online payments to be made more easily.

Even though North America has made a lot of progress, it makes up only 7 percent of the company’s overall revenue. For the full year 2011, the North American division reported total revenue of $80 million, which is up 50 percent since 2008.

Min Kim said he sees a big opportunity lying ahead in the traditional games space, where people play games for years at a time and for long stretches every month. As a younger gaming demographic grows up, and moves on from other experiences, such as Disney’s Club Penguin, “we’ll be in the sweet spot,” he said.

So, thank God for Wells Fargo analyst Jason Maynard, who asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg point blank whether the company was building its own phone.

At first Zuckerberg’s answer seemed to be a fairly strong “no.”

“There are lots of things that you can build in other operating systems, as well,” Zuckerberg said, “that aren’t really taking — that aren’t really like building out a whole phone which I think wouldn’t really make much sense for us to do.” (Emphasis obviously mine.)

But back up for a second. Nobody, including AllThingsD, ever said Facebook was building its own phone. As my colleagues reported last year, Facebook tapped Taiwanese cellphone manufacturer HTC as a partner in working on a Facebook phone, one that has the social network’s platform fully integrated deep into the core of the hardware.

And Zuckerberg was careful in how he worded his answer. “We thought a lot about this question,” Zuckerberg said. “We want to not just have apps that people use, but also be kind of as deeply integrated into these systems as possible.”

His comments still leave tons of room for the company to be doing most of the work on a phone, while working alongside one or many partner manufacturers to do the actual hardware. Even Apple could arguably say it doesn’t manufacture phones — Foxconn builds the phones — and Apple is the most profitable phone maker in the world.

Speaking of Apple, a potential Zuckerbergian shuck and jive like this recalls a move by another famed tech CEO: Steve Jobs. He’s one of Zuck’s former mentors, with the young CEO taking in Jobs’s decades of experience on long walks together through Palo Alto. And up until the very moment Apple was ready to announce a product, Jobs had no qualms about publicly pooh-poohing rumored products — just as he did onstage with Walt Mossberg at the D: All Things Digital conference, nearly a decade ago.

Keeping that in mind, Bloomberg’s story from Wednesday resurfaces exactly what we reported a year ago: The phone is set to debut sometime in the next year or so. As Nick Bilton noted in a New York Times column in June, Facebook has even hired ex-Apple mobile engineers, with the express intent of getting the phone out the door by next year.

That said, Facebook could be shifting gears, especially considering the recent departures from the company. As we reported, former CTO Bret Taylor was spearheading the Buffy project — that is, before he announced he would soon leave to work on his own start-up.

Whatever the case, we’d be remiss to take Zuck’s answer at face value.

Yes, the expected attention will rest on the company’s admitted weaknesses: Facebook’s young advertising business faces stiff challenges as consumers flock from desktop to mobile. Also looming is Facebook’s symbiotic relationship with Zynga.

But a more persistent question remains: It’s not about Facebook’s balance sheet, but its CEO and his relationship status with Wall Street.

To this point, Mark Zuckerberg has made it abundantly clear: He couldn’t care less what the Street thinks of him. He only appeared at some, not all investment bank stops during the company’s IPO road show, much of the time clad in a hoodie (gasp!). His focus is the product and strategy of the company, and he lets lieutenants like Sheryl Sandberg and David Ebersman deal with investors.

“We don’t build services to make money,” Zuckerberg wrote in his founder’s letter last February. “We make money to build better services.”

So how, then, will Zuckerberg deal with the rigmarole of quarterly earnings, the needling of analysts?

It is possible — though not probable, I’d bet — that he’ll pull a no-show the first time around. When I asked whether or not Zuckerberg would be on the call, Facebook had no comment.

More likely: He’ll pull a flyby, akin to the likes of Larry Page’s first earnings call as CEO — though (hopefully) better executed.

Think back to when Page first took the reins, a little more than a year ago. Instead of leading the call, Google scripted an awkwardly staged Larry drop-in at the beginning, with Page essentially reading from a list of Google’s quarterly accomplishments and then bailing. He handed his Q&A duties off to Patrick Pichette — the practiced, well-spoken Google CFO — instead of sticking around.

Since then, Page has grudgingly agreed to stay for the whole thing — when he can – but expects his deputies to handle most of the call’s formalities, and Wall Street now seems okay with that. I think Zuckerberg will use the same script, and will ask Sandberg and Ebersman to carry most of the load, as they did in the months leading up to the company’s Nasdaq debut.

Still, despite delegating those concerns to his colleagues, investors will still want to hear from the man at the top, the one who has the greatest insight into long-term strategy.

Zuckerberg can speak to potential retention problems, for instance, especially in the wake of his deputy and CTO Bret Taylor leaving the company to work on his own start-up. And he could broadly sketch Facebook’s M&A strategy, following up on the dozen or so acquisitions the company has already completed this year, while giving guidance as to what’s on its shopping list — especially with a fat $16 billion burning a hole in its pocket after the IPO.

Mr. Kwon succeeds Choi Gee-sung, who has led the world’s largest technology manufacturer as CEO since early 2009.

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Cook is forgoing $75 million in dividends to which he’s entitled.

In a Thursday SEC filing, Apple announced plans to award a $2.65-a-share quarterly dividend on restricted stock units held by its employees. It’s a nice — and unusual — perk to offer (and one certain to cement employee loyalty in a very competitive talent arena), but Cook is passing it up.

From Apple’s 8-K:

At Mr. Cook’s request, none of his restricted stock units will participate in dividend equivalents. Assuming a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share over the vesting periods of his 1.125 million outstanding restricted stock units, Mr. Cook will forego approximately $75 million in dividend equivalent value.

That’s a lot of money to turn down. True, Cook is very well compensated — deservedly so, considering Apple’s performance — so he can obviously afford to forgo it. But, as best I can tell, he didn’t have to. 

So Cook truly did just walk away from $75 million. Which is remarkable for an executive of his standing in an era when entitlement, greed and arrogance are so often part of the job description. Which is not to say that he’s not reaping some benefits here. There’s a lot of mileage for Apple in a symbolic gesture like this, and Cook profits when Apple’s overall value increases.

Say what you will, but this was a classy gesture up and down. When was the last time you saw headlines about a successful CEO of a wildly successful company walking away from millions of dollars that he could have just as easily pocketed?

Clearly, Cook is focused on more important and interesting things than having the biggest yacht in the harbor.

It’s here.

Facebook, the 900-million-strong social network that knows more about us than even our closest friends, will become a publicly traded company within the next hour.

Private equity dealmakers will celebrate alongside cadres of newly minted millionaire engineers in Menlo Park, Calif., while retail investors the world around will clamor amongst themselves, tooth and claw, for the chance to share in a mere fraction of the riches.

And yet, after a year of watching tech IPOs — Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn, Yelp — let’s all admit that it kind of borders on anticlimactic.

We know we’ll most likely see a nice pop in the share price after Mark Zuckerberg rings in the Nasdaq bell remotely from Facebook’s spanking-new HQ in Silicon Valley.

From there, like a floating jump ball up for grabs, the social networking giant’s closing stock price is anyone’s guess — and by the looks of my Twitter feed, everyone’s guess. There’s already a site dedicated to tracking what price Facebook’s stock will settle at when the markets close, a page peppered with numbers posited by the digital elite.

Today is about the money. And yet it is also more than just sitting and watching the ticker tape roll by. For the first time, Zuckerberg’s vision of making the world a more open place will finally apply to his own company.

We got our first taste of it when the company filed its S-1. It’s where we saw that more than half of Facebook’s 900 million monthly visitors are visiting the site via mobile devices, a channel in which the company has yet to figure out a coherent or viable monetization strategy.

We saw that Zuckerberg retains a tight grip on the company’s future — tighter than most CEOs, akin to the likes of Google’s co-founders — holding voting rights on 57.1 percent of Facebook’s mighty class-B shares. He is so tied to his company that he is cited as a risk factor in Facebook’s S-1, of course.

And now we’re witnessing the first defectors from Facebook’s nacent advertising strategy, as with General Motors pulling its $10 million dollars in advertising on Facebook earlier this week, citing it as an ineffective use of the company’s massive marketing budget.

What we’ll soon see is Facebook’s less-pretty public profile, so to speak, with Zuckerberg holding court over earnings calls every quarter, taking heat from investors who expect returns. We’ll be given insight into how the company plans to monetize its different products, and how they actually fare.

Just as Facebook knows so very much about each of us, we, too, will begin to learn a lot more about Facebook.

And yet, through all of this, no matter what grim forecast Wall Street projects, no matter what executive decisions or company road maps the media decries, Zuckerberg’s message is clear — so much so that he made it the poster for the pre-IPO all-night hackathon:

“Stay focused and keep hacking.”

Good luck with that.

(Images: (top) Morin Uwole/Facebook; (bottom) Victor Luu/Facebook)

In January, as the freshly crowned CEO of Yahoo, Scott Thompson initiated a series of dramatic acts to get the company back on track. The most notable was to make the boldest — or most boneheaded — move the head of Yahoo could make: Filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook.

The controversial move was wildly unpopular in Silicon Valley, and even among many Yahoo employees.

But after a drawn-out weeklong controversy over a fake computer science degree on Thompson’s resume, he is reportedly headed out, and global media head Ross Levinsohn is in the driver’s seat as interim CEO.

Now one of the big questions is: Will Levinsohn take steps to repair Yahoo’s relationship with Facebook, especially since it has proved to be one of the most fruitful the ailing Silicon Valley Internet giant has seen in years?

Sources say that some members of Yahoo’s board, as well as the top exec, would welcome a settlement with Facebook on the litigation. Thompson was the main advocate of the in-your-face strategy against the social networking giant, levying a barrage of legal claims at a critical time — the quiet period before Facebook’s public offering this month.

So, if Yahoo wanted to turn back the tide of rancor toward Facebook, now is the time it could happen.

The lawsuit essentially deemed Facebook a thief of Yahoo’s social innovation, claiming that were it not for Yahoo’s many years of research and development, products such as Facebook’s News Feed, privacy settings, advertising models and more would never have come into existence.

“Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology,” one line from Yahoo’s lawsuit reads.

It’s unclear how much Levinsohn, acting as temporary CEO, will be able to change, in terms of the progress of the lawsuit. But if he’s looking to dial things back, his first call could be to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who would be instrumental in reaching some sort of detente in the case.

The initial act of aggression from Yahoo caught many in technology — including Yahoo’s employees — by surprise.

That’s because the various partnerships that the pair have struck in recent years have been hugely successful.

Yahoo’s Facebook-integrated Social Bar application, for example, has essentially been a traffic funnel from Facebook to Yahoo, with nearly 40 million monthly active users accessing the application, according to AppData statistics, and it is now one of the top Facebook apps.

It’s what Director of Product Development Jonathan Katzman called, in an interview last year, “the future of social for Yahoo.”

Finding a middle ground in some sort of settlement with Facebook could win back Yahoo detractors, a culture that praises innovation and largely rebuffs the practice of patent litigation as an act of trolling.

Facebook declined to comment, as did Yahoo, but several sources said to expect some movement sooner than later.

Aneel Bhusri

Sources familiar with the company’s plans tell AllThingsD that Workday has chosen the four bankers that will lead it through the IPO process: Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Allen & Company and JPMorgan Chase & Co. The search for bankers caps a process begun in December.

The company’s IPO path calls for an S-1 filing to be made with the Securities and Exchange Commission by mid-July. After a late summer or early fall road show, its shares would debut between October and December, depending on how favorable market conditions are, sources familiar with the matter tell me.

The process began in earnest after Workday hired its new CFO, Mark Peek, away from VMware, where he was also CFO.

Workday is feeling emboldened in part by the successful offerings of Jive Software and Splunk, both enterprise companies with their hands in the cloud business. Workday itself is a pure cloud software play, specializing in human resources applications, a white-hot area of enterprise that has seen a lot of M&A activity of late.

In December, software concern SAP spent $3.4 billion to acquire SuccessFactors. Then, in February, software giant Oracle spent $1.9 billion to acquire Taleo, in a deal that took place shortly after I interviewed Taleo’s CEO. Even Salesforce got into the act, acquiring the start-up Rypple for an undisclosed amount in December.

Much of that dealmaking came in response to concerns about Workday, especially after its impressive $85 million Series F round of institutional funding at a $2 billion valuation, which AllThingsD reported exclusively in October. A Bloomberg News report said that round was oversubscribed and grew to $100 million when Michael Dell’s MSD Ventures joined.

Investors in that round included several who also took part in institutional rounds in Facebook and Web gaming player Zynga: T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Janus, and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment entity of Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos. William Danoff, the manager of Fidelity’s $80 billion Contrafund, the mutual fund giant’s largest stock-based fund, also participated in that round.

A Workday IPO, which would raise about $500 million, would make for a sweet payday for the company’s earlier investors, which include Dave Duffield and Greylock Partners, who invested $90 million in four rounds, and New Enterprise Associates, which joined a $75 million Series E round in 2009. By my math, Workday’s total capital raised comes to a cool $195 million.

So how’s business? With the company having disclosed $160 million in billings total bookings in 2010, sources familiar with its operations tell me bookings in 2011 exceeded 100 percent growth. That would be above the $320 million in 2011 bookings CEO Aneel Bhusri told me he expected last October.

Workday is essentially the creation of PeopleSoft vets Bhusri and Duffield. They started the company in 2005, not long after losing a pitched battle to resist a $10 billion hostile takeover by Oracle. Bhusri and Duffield concluded that the next battlefield for enterprise software would be in the cloud. They kickstarted Workday using their own money and some funding from Greylock, and brought some PeopleSoft employees with them.

The idea was to re-create PeopleSoft, which makes software that businesses need to run day to day, but to deliver it from the cloud.

And unlike other cloud players that approach smaller companies and work their way up to ever-larger customers, Workday’s customers are already in the big leagues. The average Workday customer — there are 280 — has between 10,000 and 15,000 employees. The biggest is Flextronics, the huge electronics manufacturing company, which has 200,000 employees. Other customers include Time Warner, Thomson Reuters, Chiquita Brands and Salesforce.com. There are Workday records on more than two million employees on its system. All that after only four-plus years of active selling. A second, newer line of financial applications aimed at helping companies more efficiently manage their spending is getting traction, too.

Workday will probably be the biggest among a pending batch of enterprise-oriented IPOs set for summer and fall after the Facebook madness is over. For one, there’s Violin Memory, which I’ve been reporting on quite a bit. And Reuters is reporting that cloud storage and collaboration concern Box is looking like it’s eyeing an IPO in 2013. The bankers are going to be busy.