Hara has been one of the fastest growing firms in the energy management market, so naturally competitors are picking off members of the team.
Rival ENXSuite today announced that David Port, formerly the vice president of partner sales at Hara, is now its vice president of global business development and alliances. And before that, SAP--without any fanfare whatsoever--hired Chris Klayko, Hara's former director of North American sales, to become the vice president of the sustainability line in North America. We heard rumors about departures at Hara the night before and, voila, here's your proof. There might be more--we will continue to look.
UPDATE: there are more. David Engelbrecht, Hara's former vice president of solution engineering, has joined SAP as a sustainability specialist. Three guys from one start-up and two vice presidents: any way you look at it, people in the office will notice.
Sales execs at enterprise software firms often shuttle between competitors and rivals. It's the same kind of loyalty you see between a hungry mother fish and all of those eggs she just laid. Still, the moves are interesting. ENXSuite, formerly Carbonetworks, has been a longtime rival of Hara. Earlier this year, it shifted away from carbon accounting to energy management, which made it a more direct competitor to Hara.
Hara's founder and CEO, Amit Chatterjee, and CTO Udo Waibel both came out of SAP. Executives from these companies--off the record, of course--frequently like to mention how they beat out one or the other on a recent contract. Klayko came from SAP as well. But SAP also snagged a technological executive too.
Silver Spring Networks, another high-flyer, recently saw the departure of Judy Lin, a Cisco alum that served as chief product officer, and John O'Farrell, who was not the guy who played J. Peterman.
Hara (as in "Hara! The gang's all here") says that its software measures organizational metabolism. Kleiner Perkins put money into the firm. Both Hara and ENXSuite are considered prime acquisition targets in green tech. IBM, Oracle, SAP, HP see sustainability and management as strong markets for service and software offerings. Hara customers include Apple, Google, News Corp and Safeway.