Symbol CEO Jumps To Top Spot At NCR

Hurd left NCR to take on the CEO role at Hewlett-Packard, leaving the NCR chief post vacant. But rather than tap a current NCR executive, the company reached outside to appoint an industry executive with a strong track record for growth.

Symbol partners last week said they are concerned about the future direction of the vendor, given the fact that Nuti turned around the financially troubled Symbol by partnering more aggressively with the channel.

“This is going to leave a big hole,” said Jeff Lem, CEO of QData, a Symbol partner based in Toronto. “It&'s quite a shock.”

Lem credits Nuti, who joined Symbol from Cisco Systems, with bringing in a new management team that not only turned Symbol around, but did it by creating a more open and level playing field for channel partners, he said.

Todd Abbott, Symbol&'s vice president of worldwide operations, said last week that Nuti&'s departure in no way signals a change in strategy for Holtsville, N.Y.-based Symbol.

“Bill just got an opportunity to run a much bigger company,” Abbott said.

Furthermore, Abbot said that he and other senior Symbol managers were committed to staying with the company, even though many of them joined Symbol from Cisco, San Jose, Calif., where they had worked with Nuti, some for as long as 10 years.

In the meantime, it remains to seen what impact Nuti will have on NCR&'s largely direct selling model. He has historically been a strong advocate for revenue growth, which has eluded NCR for the past several years.

Instead, Dayton, Ohio-based NCR has been more focused on operations as part of the cost-cutting effort that Hurd led.

Some Wall Street analysts said that Nuti will have to take a slower approach to continuing the transformation at NCR than he did at Symbol, where he replaced all 16 senior vice presidents and either terminated or replaced two-thirds of the Symbol workforce.

Matt Summerville, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, a division of McDonald Investments, wrote in a research report last week that NCR&'s existing business model appears to be sound, and with long-time NCR insider Jim Ringler becoming chairman, any subsequent changes at NCR would be consistent with the pace of the company&'s previous restructuring efforts.