Less than a week after resigning from his job as president of IBM subsidiary Tivoli Systems Inc. (stock: IBM), David Murphy says he will become president and CEO at Asera Inc.

Asera, a maker of E-business management applications, offers clients its eBusiness Operating System, which merges best-in-class applications to permit real-time communication with customers, partners, suppliers, and employees.

In an interview with InformationWeek, Murphy says his exit from Tivoli was largely motivated by a desire to guide a company early in its development. And while Murphy was involved in efforts to help the troubled IBM subsidiary enter new market segments, such as storage management, security, Web solutions, and pervasive computing, the challenge of taking Asera from infancy to being a dominate player in E-business was too compelling to overlook. "I've been mulling this for several months," he says.

Murphy joins a list of industry luminaries at Asera. The company was founded by Vinod Khosla, who serves as chairman. Khosla is general partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a co-founder of Daisy Systems, and founding CEO of Sun Microsystems. Also on Asera's board: former Oracle president Ray Lane, Cisco Systems CIO Peter Solvik, and FedEx CIO Robert Carter.

Murphy will succeed Warren Weiss, who joined Asera in 1998. Weiss helped the company use its initial $175 million in corporate-and venture-backed investment to land 30 large enterprise customers, including BP Amoco, Cadence Design Systems, and Extreme Networks. Asera has 350 employees and is valued at nearly $1 billion.

Weiss says he's leaving the CEO post largely for personal reasons, citing the desire to spend more time with his family.