Brightcove’s Jeremy Allaire To Step Down As CEO, Transition To Board Position

Brightcove just announced their Q4 and fiscal year 2012 earnings, with total revenue coming in at $88M for 2012. The company also announced that CEO Jeremy Allaire will step down as CEO and turn the position over to David Mendels, Brightcove’s current President and COO. Jeremy will transition out of his CEO role by the end of Q1 and will become Executive Chairman of the Board for the company.

While some are already asking me if Jeremy is being pushed out of the company, I have no reason to believe he is. Even though Brightcove’s stock price is near its 52 week low, I don’t think that has anything to do with the decision, like some have suggested. Jeremy is quoted saying that David is “the right person to lead Brightcove into its next stage of growth” and David Mendels was previously the SVP and GM of Adobe’s Business Productivity Unit, which generated over $1B in revenue. So the guy clearly knows something about building and ramping revenue.

While I haven’t had the chance yet to speak to either Jeremy or David about the news, this simply sounds like Brightcove taking the steps they think are best to be able to grow the company over the coming years. Brightcove needs to ramp revenue and get their company to that next growth stage and it sounds like they think David is the guy to do that. Plus, Jeremy’s been leading Brightcove for the past eight years, which is a long time to be CEO in any industry and bringing in new blood isn’t always a bad thing. So while some are suggesting to me that this change is bad news for Brightcove, or that Jeremy stepping down is due to something negative at the company, I see no reason why that would be the case. They are putting a new executive in the CEO role who has experience in growing and managing products and services that generated $1B in revenue. I don’t see that as a bad thing.

For 2013, Brightcove’s says they expect revenue to be in the $102M to $105M range.