30 Notable IT Executive Moves: January 2013

Start It Off

CRN's monthly roundup of notable IT executive moves continues through January, highlighting moves at VMware, IBM, Brocade and a host of service providers, master agencies and VARs. Have a look.

Stephen Herrod

As virtualization rock stars go, Stephen Herrod is definitely a name. That's why when the VMware CTO announced his intention to exit after more than a decade, it made headlines. Herrod disclosed his pending departure in mid-January, saying he would move on to become managing director at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups.

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo spent 30 years at Nokia, including as president and CEO, before its declining performance forced him out in 2010. Kallasvuo has a new gig now, apparently -- the Associated Press reported in mid-January that he joined Swedish TV software specialist Zenterio as its chairman of the board.

Lloyd Carney

Brocade finally has its new steward. Lloyd Carney, a 30-year technology veteran, was named CEO of Brocade in mid-January, succeeding Michael Klayko, who had confirmed plans to step down several months earlier. Carney, previously CEO at Xsigo Systems, also was CEO of Micromuse, a chief operating officer at Juniper Networks, and a past president of Nortel's core IP, wireless and enterprise businesses.

Michael Daniels

Big Blue's had some big changes during the changeover from former CEO Sam Palmisano to current CEO Ginni Rometty, and in January it announced another: Michael Daniels, the company's top services executive, is retiring. Daniels, whose title is SVP and group executive services, will retire at the end of March after a 31-year career with the company.

Nick Adamo

In a story first reported by CRN, Nick Adamo was named senior vice president, worldwide field operations, the Americas, at Cisco in mid-January. Adamo succeeds Chuck Robbins, who became senior vice president of global sales and field operations in October. Adamo was most recently SVP, global segments and architectures, but is best known for his years running Cisco's service provider business in the U.S.

Symantec C-Suite

There's been many changes afoot at Symantec, which in late January started to articulate its strategy for restructuring and restoring growth. Among the key executive changes was the splitting of the chairman and CEO roles: Steve Bennett, who held both following his move to become chief executive last summer, is now CEO and president, and Dan Schulman (pictured), an independent director, is now non-executive board chairman.

Yahoo Past and Present

A number of current and former Yahoos made headlines in the past month. Shashi Seth, senior vice president of Yahoo Connections, was confirmed to be leaving the company as of mid-January. Ross Levinsohn, the former interim Yahoo CEO who was the odds-on favorite to become the full-time new CEO last year just before the curveball Marissa Mayer appointment, was confirmed in mid-January to be the new chief executive of Guggenheim Digital Media. And Tim Morse (pictured), the beleaguered Yahoo CFO and briefly interim CEO who finally left the company in the fall, is now at ad exchange startup Adap.tv.

John McCormack

Security player Websense has a new CEO, and it's John McCormack, who succeeds retiring CEO and board member Gene Hodges. McCormack has been at Websense since 2006 -- the same year Hodges became CEO -- and became president in April 2009 after a few years as SVP of product development.

Jack Ma

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma resigned in mid-January, but it wasn't really a surprise according to reports -- he had begun giving nine Alibaba presidents more responsibility and autonomy to prepare for the transition. The colorful Ma will remain chairman of the e-commerce powerhouse and Amazon competitor, which he founded in 1999.

Keith Rabois

One thing the tech industry never tires of is a good C-suite-level sex scandal, and mobile payments upstart Square's got its hands full with the fallout from one. COO Keith Rabois resigned in mid-January after a male employee accused him of sexual harassment. Rabois admitted to a physical relationship, but in a detailed blog post at the time of his resignation, he said the charges amounted to a "shakedown."

Roy Taylor

Roy Taylor, a well-known Nvidia executive, is headed for AMD as its newest global channel chief. It was a position that had been vacant for nearly two years and last held by John Byrne, who is now AMD's chief sales officer. Byrne and Taylor go back to their days at Blue Micro Electronics two decades ago.

Ted Kummert

Microsoft is one of those tech companies at which changes are just kind of constant. Ted Kummert, its corporate vice president, Data Platform Group, confirmed in mid-January he would depart by the end of the month. Kummert spent 24 years at Microsoft, and previous roles included heading Microsoft's SQL Server, Azure, BizTalk Server, Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure platform AppFabric teams.

Luca Maestri

Xerox's chief financial officer, Luca Maestri, is leaving the company to become corporate controller at Apple, several outlets confirmed in mid-January. Maestri succeeds Betsy Rafael, who retired from Apple in October.

Lou D'Ambrosio

Lou D'Ambrosio was less than two years into his tenure heading Sears Holdings, but the retail giant announced n early January that he would leave and that chairman Edward Lampert would take over. D'Ambrosio, who spent two years as CEO of Avaya and was well-known in the channel for the 16 years he spent at IBM, cited "family health matters."

Devinder Kumar

AMD's seen plenty of changes in the last few years, and began 2013 with another one: Devinder Kumar, a senior vice president, became full-time chief financial officer. Kumar has been serving as interim CFO following the exit of former CFO Thomas Seifert last fall. He's been at AMD 28 years, serving as a corporate controller at since 2001 and a senior vice president since 2006.

Tom Mitchell

Since joining Avaya as a consultant nearly three years ago, longtime channel-hand Tom Mitchell's led a turnaround of the Avaya channel program that's starting to bear fruit. Now, Mitchell will turn his attention to Avaya's global sales organization -- he was promoted to SVP, global sales, in early January. Mitchell succeeds Joel Hackney, the former Nortel enterprise president who will now head Avaya's cloud strategy.

Ingram Micro Roundup

Changes were aplenty at Ingram Micro, both for current employees and a few former ones, too. Kirk Robinson (pictured) is now SVP, commercial markets and global accounts for North America, a mover that adds global accounts to his purview. Brent McCarty, who'd run Ingram's consumer electronic business, is now executive managing director of Ingram Micro U.K. and Ireland. Tom Bamrick, previously executive director of Global Sales and East Campus, now heads the consumer electronics division.

Elsewhere, Bashar Nejdawi, formerly SVP of corporate strategic initiatives and partnerships for Ingram Micro Mobility, is now president of Ingram Micro North America Mobility. J. Mark Howell, who had Nejdawi's new job, left Ingram Micro to become COO of Angie's List.

Dave Johnson

A number of executives have both joined and left Dell in the past year, and one of the more recent departure was Dave Johnson, Dell's senior vice president of corporate strategy and a key figure in its string of recent, enterprise-focused acquisitions. Johnson, who joined Dell from IBM in 2009, is headed for private equity firm Blackstone Group.

Christy Wyatt

Christy Wyatt was named president and CEO of Good Technology in early January, succeeding King Lee, who will remain as executive chairman of Good's board. Wyatt, a 15-year veteran of tech company executive management, is best known as the former SVP and general manager for Motorola Mobility's Enterprise Business Unit. She also worked at Apple, Sun Microsystems, JavaSoft and ESRI.

Dave Robbins

MokaFive has a fast-growing reputation as a disrupter in the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) market for its alternative approach to tethered VDI. It also has a new CEO: Dave Robbins, who was confirmed in mid-January. Robbins was most recently chairman, president and CEO of BigFix, which was acquired by IBM in 2010, and held CEO and COO jobs at a range of startups in the past.

Damian Artt/Michael Alp

More executive additions at Polycom, which has steadily remade its upper echelon since Andy Miller became CEO in May 2010. Damian Artt is now Polycom's president of the Americas, following previous stints at Wind River Systems, where he served as SVP, worldwide sales, as well as other roles there and at Cadence Design Systems. Michael Alp, meanwhile, is now Polycom's president, Asia-Pacific region. Alp was most recently vice president of APAC and Japan for EMC, and at Polycom he succeeds Hansjoerg Wagner, who retired from the company.

Robin Bienfait

So many changes at Research In Motion, including that as of mid-January, the company is no longer known as RIM and is instead known by the same-name as its flagship product, BlackBerry. Among executive moves, however, is CIO Robin Bienfait, who RIM confirmed in mid-January will retire at the end of this year. Bienfait's role is pivotal: she was not only in charge of RIM's enterprise services division but also focused on getting RIM's hugely important BB10 ready for customers.

Brian Olson

Condusiv, formerly known as Diskeeper Corp., has been making a number of major executive appointments over the past year. The latest, in January, was Brian Olson, who becomes the company's CTO. Most recently, Olson was cloud business development manager at EMC, and he also worked as CTO of Atempo Corp., CTO of Storactive and as a VP of Veritas Software.

Shehzad Merchant

Extreme Networks has continued to fine-tune its executive team under CEO Oscar Rodriguez, who joined the company to lead a turnaround effort back in 2010. Among recent moves was the promotion of Shehzad Merchant, most recently VP of technology, to CTO. Merchant's been heavily involved in Extreme's Open Fabric data center strategy as well as software-defined networking, the ExtremeOS platform and networked applications management.

Alan Cox

Alan Cox, well-known for his contributions to the Linux kernel and, according to the Linux Foundation, the "18th most active individual contributor," is leaving Intel and will no longer be involved with Linux development. Cox cited family reasons for his exit in a post to his Google+ page.

Les Trachtman

There have been a few changings of the guard at the country's top solution providers as of late, and one of the most recent was at Force 3, the Crofton, Md.-based federal government systems integrator and Solution Provider 500 staple. Les Trachtman, who had been Force 3's COO since 2008, is now CEO, succeeding founder Rocky Cintron, who shifted to become board chairman.

Lauren Shapiro

Master agency PlanetOne promoted one of its key executives, Lauren Shapiro, to the role of president. A 27-year tech industry veteran, Shapiro joined PlanetOne in November 2010 and previously ran channel sales at Internap Network Services, among other postings.

Carol Beering

More master agency maneuvers: Carol Beering was promoted to senior vice president, sales operations, at Intelisys. Beering's been at the company since 2003, where she was director of partner support and then a vice president starting in 2008, and has helped Intelisys scale into one of the country's most recognized master agent partners and telecom/cloud convergence specialists.

Vic Bhagat

Another re-shuffling of the EMC executive team included the naming of former Accenture executive Vic Bhagat as CIO and vice president of corporate services, in charge of EMC's IT, global centers of excellence, global business services and indirect procurement. He succeeds Sanjay Mirchandani, who is shifting into the Pivotal Initiative, the spin-off organization headed by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

Matthew Schiltz

As January wound down, cloud services provider Tier 3 named Matthew Schiltz its new president and CEO. Schiltz was most recently CEO of cloud storage specialist Symform, and he also ran startups DocuSign and CourtLink. Schiltz succeeds co-founder and CEO Jared Wray, who'd been acting CEO since the fall.