No sooner had SuSE announced that it had changed CEOs than MandrakeSoft, its French neighbor, popped up with the news that Mandrake co-founder and CEO Jacques Le Marois had stepped down again in favor of a businessman, this time a guy by the name of Francois Bancilhon, who started and ran Versailles-based O2 Technology, the object database company that merged with RDBMS shop Unidata in 1997.

Unidata in turn merged with VMark Software to become Ardent Software, which was then acquired by Informix in 2000 and after IBM bought the Informix database what was left of Informix became Ascential Software. Bancilhon was CTO during the Unidata part of the trip and an Ardent VP and general manager handling the Unidata-O2 unit for that turn of the wheel.

In 1999 Bancilhon, 54, started Arioso, an ASP in the states and more recently was CTO of SomaLogic, a Boulder, Colorado biotech. Between times, he seems to have founded and is still chairman of Xyleme, an XML tools house and INRIA spin-off that got a second round worth 11 million euros in September from Deutsche Bank and the VC arm of Vivendi Universal among others.

The last time Le Marois, who remains Mandrake’s chairman and president, tried importing a business manager – the American web entrepreneur Henry Poole – the nine-month experiment came to grief. Poole and couple of other Mandrake executives were forced out last year in a disagreement over whether Mandrake’s future should be just Linux. Poole was trying to ensure Mandrake survived by diversifying into e-learning and e-support operation with no special focus on Linux.

Bancilhon has no particular Linux background either.

Mandrake claims that after 18 months of “intensive restructuring,” it is showing “extremely positive results. Revenue is up and expenses have been “drastically” cut. It now feels it is at the stage where it needs an experienced manager capable of taking it to the next level – and keep the open source flame burning at the same time.

In a canned statement Bancilhon touched on the “radical” potential of Linux and free software and said that “much can be done at MandrakeSoft to increase the business side of the company.

Mandrake seems to have done about 4.6 million euros in its 2001-2002 fiscal year, up 28% year-over-year, but lost that much and more on its operations.