If you live near San Francisco, you may have seen Paul Butterworth, the 51-year-old cofounder and chief technology officer of AmberPoint, a Web-services company that's his third startup. He's the one zipping around in the fiery red Ferrari 500.He's also one of the architects of the commercial relational database, a key technology behind today's Internet infrastructure and corporate information storage. For example, Amazon.com uses a relational database to look you up and recommend a book for you based on your past purchases. Mr. Butterworth started tinkering with the technology in 1980 when he was 29. His early work led to a job with the newly formed Ingres, one of the first commercial database companies.

As employee No. 1 and the chief architect, he worked to create a commercial distributed database. At the time, he says, everyone thought relational databases could never be an industrial strength solution for large corporations and that they could not replace the then-dominant databases

"Since it was a new market, there was a lot of confusion of about what a relational database management system actually was, and we competed with all sorts of file systems and primitive databases that labeled themselves as RDBMS," he recalls. "Over three years most of these players fell by the wayside, and it became a battle between Ingres, Oracle, and Informix," with Sybase coming later.

It wasn't until 1989 that relational database products were strong enough to be used in mission-critical applications by the average organization. Ingres became a huge success and was bought by ASK Computer Systems in 1990 for $110 million. Realizing that the era of monolithic computing was coming to an end, Mr. Butterworth decided it was time to expand his horizons. He started Forte Software, a company that developed software management and development tools for the emerging client/server world. Forte was bought by Sun Microsystems in August 1999 for $540 million.

"Paul is one of the preeminent software technologists in the country. He has made a name for himself having built two commercial products at two extremely successful enterprise software companies," says Promod Haque, general partner with Norwest Venture Partners and an AmberPoint investor.

Mr. Butterworth's newest venture, AmberPoint, has raised $10 million in it's first round of funding from Sutter Hill Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners, and it is developing software that helps manage Web-services protocols like .Net and the Liberty Alliance.

"A lot of people assumed that, because of my database roots, my next venture was going to involve databases, but I have already done that," he says. So when John Hubinger, now CEO of AmberPoint, proposed that they start a company focused on Web services, Mr. Butterworth just could not say no. "If you look at it, it is in keeping with the theme of distributed systems--distributed databases, applications, and now distributed systems," he says.

Mr. Hubinger confesses that if Mr. Butterworth had not signed on, it would have been difficult to raise money for their new venture. Mr. Butterworth, he says, is the ultimate calling card, the reason the company has gotten 12 beta customers in less than a year. "Because of his successful track record, Paul has earned tremendous credibility with customers and business partners," says Mr. Haque of Norwest.

"Things have changed since the early days," says Mr. Butterworth, who has seen Silicon Valley go from a sleepy outpost to the world's technology capital. "Now you have to understand what big vendors like IBM and Microsoft are doing and that certainly adds a new dimension to building a successful company. Unless you fit nicely with the big guys, you don't have a chance."

Sources From:RED HERRING 2002