Just prior to Art Landro’s first day as Sencha CEO, I had a chance to ask him what would change when he took the helm. He answered that Sencha is already on the right track, and that none of that trajectory would soon change. It was about augmenting what currently exists and working to understand the Enterprise’s particular needs and incorporating its requirements.

Art Landro’s CV offers a picture of a man who has focused on the strategic, in roles at Cordys (now part of OpenText), MontaVista Software (part of Cavium Networks (News – Alert)) and EMC. Prevalent among his many skills is the managing of the direct sales channel and product management teams.

Given Landro’s past as the Cordys CEO and his work with BPM systems, it makes perfect sense that he would bring to his new position an awareness and willingness to understand the needs of the Enterprise.

Among the topics Landro and I discussed was the issue of supporting all of the legacy apps IT is managing that now have to be delivered to mobile end points in BYOD situations. Sencha does not intend to act as referee in the HTML5 vs. native debate, as much as it intends to give enterprises a platform on which to deliver apps to the most people, on the most devices, and as easily as possible.

When it comes to mobilizing legacy apps, the main issue changes from a HTML5 vs. native technology discussion to a business discussion of how the company can best deliver apps and present data to mobile users. Clearly, that is the thrust behind the last release of Ext JS, which is on the forefront of Landro’s mind.

In addition, to better serve large Enterprise IT departments, Landro intends to deploy a combination of Sencha engineers (to develop Enterprise-class products that meet the challenges of the heterogeneous Enterprise IT environment) and support staff (to provide training, services and support to meet the demanding “delivery and up times” required). All of this while striving to stay in touch with the company’s innovation roots.

The BYOD market has thus far been scarcely penetrated by the device operating systems of Samsung, Microsoft (News – Alert) and other companies. Specific enterprises, though, are committed to these frameworks, and as such Sencha has tasked some of their best coders with managing the requirement for direct support.

Finally, I discussed the implications of device companies’ continual innovation with Landro, and how Sencha copes when such companies as Apple (News – Alert) redesign the SDK, or other devices build momentum.  He made it clear that supporting the innovation was essential.

Of course, I asked Landro for an update in six months, however I came away from the discussion feeling certain that Art Landro will keep the momentum going at Sencha and forge a more direct relationship with their top customers.