14 DAY TRIAL // About six months ago Mozilla CEO John Lilly announced that he will be retiring as head of the open-source organization and a search began to find a replacement. Now, the search is over with Mozilla announcing that Gary Kovacs, currently an exec at SAP, will take over as CEO.
"I’m very happy to introduce Gary Kovacs as our new CEO for the Mozilla Corporation. I think he’s going to be great for Mozilla, and that our broad community will like him and be well served by him," Lilly announced.
"This introduction is the culmination of a search process that’s taken us about six months — we were quite broad in our search, as we knew it would be tough to find someone who could blend technology leadership and operational excellence with an ability to understand what’s special about how Mozilla works, and who could really help develop the whole organization," he added.
Lilly goes on to explain why he believes Kovacs is a good choice for Mozilla. For one, he's a veteran in the web space having served for quite a few companies with interest in the field.
He was VP of Marketing at Macromedia which was later acquired by Adobe. At Adobe he was general manager and vice president of mobile and devices.
More recently, he was senior vice president of markets, solutions, and products at Sybase which was acquired by SAP in May. At SAP he currently serves as vice president of mobile.
While his experience with the web and rich media tools is clear, he is even more experienced with mobile devices.
In fact, this was another key aspect for Mozilla as the company is very interested in the mobile space. Arguably, Mozilla hasn't done much for mobile devices and, though it's starting to move faster, still has a lot of catching up to do.