Most of that time he spent with the publicly traded Netezza, but he rocketed into the turn of the century with another publicly traded company he founded, Applix Inc.

Netezza, a Marlborough-Mass. company that builds high-performance computers for data storage and analysis, has 400 employees and reported $190.6 million in revenue for its last fiscal year, which ended in January. Applix, which was also based in Massachusetts, was a developer of customer relationship management software. Saxena founded Applix in 1983 and left it in 2000 to started Netezza. Applix was bought by Cognos Inc. in 2007 in a deal worth over $330 million; IBM later bought both companies.

When asked about Netezza’s continued success – the company increased its revenues last year – Saxena says that from his view, as long as there is demand for its products any business should be able to adjust and survive, no matter what the economic environment.

He said that Netezza continues to recruit employees, invest in research and development and expand, but it has kept a sharp eye to make sure it does so smartly and efficiently.

“The company continues to do well even in the last year when things were really difficult for all technologies,” Saxena said. “For us it was tough, but it was not bad.

“The industry still needs the products we make,” he added. “The problems we address are not going to go away even if the times are tough.”

Saxena, 64, stepped down from his role as chief executive officer of Netezza as 2009 came to a close and is relishing his role continuing to guide the company as chairman. “I enjoy helping the current management team as much as I can,” he said.

He also is lending his entrepreneurial experience to other entrepreneurs. He serves on the board of a number of other companies, including CloudSwitch Inc. and Authoria Inc.

As to the kind of advice he imparts, Saxena shakes off the thought that there is some kind of “secret” that he knows that allowed him to take two companies public. He said there is always uncertainty and, though he had been successful in the past with Applix, he didn’t take this as a guarantee when starting Netezza. “You don’t know the first time you start [a company] and you certainly don’t know the second time you start,” he added.

But if there is one thing he feels he has learned it is simple, but he believes it wholeheartedly. “The message is fairly straightforward: If you have the right team and the right funding and you keep the team focused on the task at hand chances are you will do well,” he said.

According to Saxena, his advice to other entrepreneurs is always: stay open to ideas, recruit the best people and keep employees focused.

He cautions heavily against anything that distracts entrepreneurs from what their company has set out to do, including concerns and worries about the economy. Saxena admits to liking a difficult economic environment for starting a new business, believing it results in an initial focus on the product and not sales.

As one who has also navigated the sometimes tricky waters of evolving from a tech founder to an executive, Saxena believes it is most important to know your own strengths and weaknesses and skills.

“Know what you enjoy because titles mean nothing,” said Saxena. “If you only like technology you should focus on that … you can hire others to run the company.”

For him, it has always been a balance of both. “I have always enjoyed the business part and I enjoyed the technology part,” he said.

However, that doesn’t mean that Saxena felt he was instantly a great CEO. He said he learned some tremendous lessons over the years.

“If there is a lesson in all this, [it is that] even though we say we are a high technology business, and that may be the case, we are really in the people business,” Saxena said. “And if you keep people focused on the right set of things you will find success.

“You must communicate this as often as you can at all levels of the company and hopefully people get that,” he added.

With a resume like his, Saxena has much to be proud of, but he says that he takes the most pride in having created hundreds of high quality, challenging and high paying jobs, most of them in the state he lives in. “That is a very, very satisfying thing,” he said.

Saxena was born in Bina, India, in 1945, the son of a doctor and the only one of four sons who didn’t pursue a career in medicine. After earning degrees at St. John's College in the northern Indian city of Agra and Bombay’s India Institute of Technology, he came to the United States for postgraduate work, earning a master's degree in electrical engineering at Michigan State University in 1968.

Saxena went to work in Honeywell International Inc.’s minicomputer division and then moved to Boston in the early 1970s to pursue a Master’s in Business Administration degree at Boston University. He next took a position with Data General – one of the nation’s first minicomputer companies – as chief of the company’s software development group. Saxena remained with Data General until 1983, when he left to start Applix.

The company, which initially developed and sold word processing and spreadsheet software for corporate workstation computers using the Unix operating system, struck gold when it created a spreadsheet application that could provide instant market data to financial traders. That was the company’s cash cow until the mid-1990s, when Unix-based computers fell out of favor as companies began to turn to Microsoft’s Office suite of products.

So, Saxena switched gears and moved Applix into business intelligence and customer relationship management. He took the company public in 1994. In 2000, realizing that he had done as much as he could with the company, he stepped down as Applix CEO and became the company’s chairman. Shortly thereafter, Saxena met Foster D. Hinshaw, who was looking for a chief executive to run a company to develop his idea for a data warehousing appliance. Saxena impressed Hinshaw with his appreciation of the still-emerging technology, and the two men agreed to join forces. In September 2000, they founded Netezza, which is Urdu for “results.”

In December of that year, Saxena raised $8 million in first-round startup funds from venture capital firms Charles River Ventures and Matrix Partners. Matrix was already familiar with Saxena, having helped to fund Applix.

Advance buzz about Netezza’s technology was so great that barely a year after the company’s founding, Saxena fielded investment officers from four venture capital firms eager to capture a stake in the company. The previous year was a relatively quiet one on the venture-capital front due the meltdown of the nationwide tech sector, so venture capital firms had plenty of money to play around with – an estimated $1 billion – and they were anxious to put it to work. But they were also conservative and only interested in the best available ideas. As a result, the right to invest in companies like Netezza was auctioned, leaving the vast majority of startups ignored.

The company’s second-round of venture funding, which wrapped up in January 2002, raised more than $25 million after investors bid up the company’s valuation. In 2003, Netezza raised $20 million, followed by $15 million in 2004. The company raised a total of $68 million. It went public in 2007, netting $108 million in its IPO.

Saxena has received numerous awards for his tech success. He has been previously named an Ernst & Young New England Entrepreneur, as well as a Mass High Tech All-Star.