30 Notable IT Executive Moves: December 2012

A Long December

While news in the tech world tends to start quieting down around mid-December, the month was still active on the executive moves front, with major changes confirmed at CA, Symantec, Dell, Google and a number of other top companies, not to mention several distributors and VARs. Here's another of CRN's monthly IT executive move roundups.

Michael Gregoire

In a left-field move, CA Technologies confirmed that Michael Gregoire, the former CEO of HR software specialist Taleo, will succeed Bill McCracken as the company's top executive in March. Gregoire headed Taleo, which was acquired by Oracle earlier in 2012, for seven years. Annual sales grew from $78 million to $324 million during his tenure, and earlier in his career Gregoire worked at PeopleSoft and EDS.

Stephen Gillett

All eyes are on Symantec in January, thanks to CEO Steve Bennett's previously mentioned plans to announce the results of a months-long strategic review and chart a new course for the beleaguered security titan. Part of that course is a makeover of the executive team, and while several Symantec executives have been ousted in the last few months, Bennett in mid-December tapped Stephen Gillett, a former Best Buy EVP, to be Symantec's new COO.

Steve Schuckenbrock

Dell in December continued its streak of major executive changes, including the appointment of Suresh Vaswani, a former top executive at Wipro, as its new president of Dell Services. That meant the exit of Steve Schuckenbrock, who in a somewhat abrupt announcement confirmed he would leave Dell to seek other opportunities.

Darren Thomas

Another major exit at Dell was storage chief Darren Thomas, who'd been with the company since 2003. Thomas' duties now fall to two executives: Alan Atkinson, vice president and general manager of Compellent, and Pete Korce, vice president and general manager, EqualLogic and NAS storage solutions. Dell is currently searching for Thomas' permanent replacement.

Ray Kurzweil

Noted author, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil made a stunning announcement in mid-December: he's joining Google as director of engineering. Kurzweil earned a reputation in the industry by founding companies based on technologies he developed, including Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Kurzweil Educational Systems and the Medical Learning Company.

Craig Mundie

The past year brought substantial changes to Microsoft's executive ranks, and near the end of September, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, confirmed his pending retirement. Mundie will shift into the role of "senior advisor to the CEO," while his main duties, which include oversight of Microsoft Research, go to Eric Rudder, chief technical strategy officer. Mundie is expected to retire in 2014.

Twitter Changes

There have been big executive changes afoot at Twitter, which in late December shuffled part of its C-suite. Ali Rowghani, formerly CFO, is now COO, and Mike Gupta, most recently treasurer and SVP of finance at Zynga, is now CFO. Both executives report to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (pictured).

Rene Obermann

Rene Obermann, chief executive officer of Deutsche Telekom, will leave his post at the end of 2013, the telecom giant announced in late December. Obermann has requested to leave to "return to entrepreneurial pursuits," according to DT, which has named CFO Timotheus Hoettges as deputy CEO as part of a planned succession.

Steven Sinofsky

Steven Sinofsky's contentious exit from Microsoft was one of the biggest Microsoft stories of 2012, but it didn't take the former Windows Division president long to find a new gig. Sinofsky said in late December that he's headed for Harvard Business School to teach and write.

Kristin Paget

Kristin Paget, formerly known as Chris Paget, is a well-known security researcher who built a reputation strengthening security in Windows at Microsoft. Paget confirmed in December a move to Apple, where she'll work on similar tools for Apple OS X and related product lines.

Tom Leighton

Content delivery networking specialist Akamai in mid-December confirmed a CEO succession, naming chief scientist Dr. Tom Leighton to replace Paul Sagan effective Jan. 1. Sagan had said back in April 2012 that he planned to leave Akamai by the end of 2013, having been president since 1999 and CEO since 2005. Leighton co-founded Akamai in 1998 and had been a member of its executive team since then.

Paul Maritz

EMC and VMware watchers are especially interested in the Pivotal Initiative, a spin-off organization of the two companies that will be focused on VMware PaaS and EMC big data technologies. Paul Maritz, former VMware CEO and now EMC's chief strategist, was confirmed by VMware in early December to be leading the initiative, which will include 600 VMware and 700 EMC employees.

Jay Lee

The heir apparent to mighty Samsung appears to be Jay Y. Lee, who was promoted to vice chairman in early December. That puts him one step closer toward taking over for his 70-year-old father, Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Kun-hee.

Paul Hooper

Network traffic and visibility specialist Gigamon made a CEO change in late December, naming Paul Hooper as its new chief executive. Hooper was most recently vice president of marketing and product management and has replaced outgoing CEO Ted Ho, a company co-founder.

Chris Doggett

Security channel veteran Chris Doggett is moving on up at Kaspersky Lab, which promoted him to run North America sales following the departure of Nancy Reynolds. That means yet another vacancy in Kaspersky's channel chief post, which has seen four different chiefs going back three and a half years. Doggett joined Kaspersky in March 2012 following two years at Financial Recovery Technologies, but he's better known for his years spent running Americas channels at Sophos.

Ted Roller

Ted Roller, the well-known channel chief at cloud backup and recovery specialist Intronis, exited the company in December to join LogMeIn. Replacing Roller at Intronis is Neal Bradbury, who helped found the company in 2003 and whose most recent title was chief product owner. However, this wasn't the only major change at Intronis in recent months; former CEO Kent Plunkett left the company in September.

Kevin Moriarty

A number of the industry's major distributors announced changes to their C-suite ranks in December, including Avnet, which named Kevin Moriarty its CFO. He is succeeding Ray Sadowski, who is retiring after 20 years but will continue with Avnet in a senior advisory role. Moriarty had been with Honeywell for a decade and previously with Bristol-Myers Squibb and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Charles Mathis

ScanSource also has a new CFO: Charles Mathis, previously CFO for Force Protection. He reports to CEO Mike Baur, who in mid-December described Mathis as bringing "strength of experience, financial leadership and international depth of knowledge."

Buck Baker

Glen "Buck" Baker, the popular president of ScanSource Communications North America, is going abroad to take over ScanSource Europe, the distributor said in mid-December. Baker will head ScanSource's European business operations, including its POS & Barcoding and Communications units. He's succeeding Xavier Cartiaux, who ran ScanSource's international operations until his November departure from the company.

Jeff Eastman

More distributor changes: Jeffrey Eastman was named president, Americas Components, at Arrow Electronics, which took effect on Jan. 1. Eastman succeeded Vinnie Vellucci, who is retiring from Arrow at the end of 2013 after nearly 44 years with the company.

Axcient Hires

In a series of executive hires announced in December, cloud storage provider Axcient cherry-picked some veteran talent from Cisco, Dell and HP. They included Ken Sims (pictured), now vice president, business development; Joe Schwartz, senior director of demand generation and direct marketing; Ann Neir, director of sales operations; and Joan Morales, director of channel marketing. Sims came from Dell Kace, with Schwartz and Neir coming from Cisco and Morales from HP.

Michael Goddard

AMD continues to lose executive talent, and the latest exit was Michael Goddard, a 25-year veteran of the company and most recently its corporate vice president for product design engineering. Goddard went to Samsung, where he is now a vice president and system architect.

Marc Lautenbach

Big changes have been afoot at printing and imaging stalwart Pitney Bowes, which named Marc Lautenbach its new CEO in early December. A 30-year industry veteran, Lautenbach joined the company following a number of senior leadership positions at IBM. He replaced Murray Martin, who retired as the company's chairman, president and CEO and also resigned from its board of directors.

Scott Genereux

Scott Genereux was named CEO of Nirvanix back in 2010, but in late 2012 exited the cloud provider to join Oracle, where he's now senior vice president of global hardware strategy, planning and product management.

Jim Morrisroe

Cloud startups continue to attract veteran IT industry executive talent to their ranks, and the trend includes enterprise OpenStack specialist Piston Cloud, which named Jim Morrisroe its CEO in early December. Morrisroe was most recently vice president and general manager of VMware-owned Zimbra, and also previously ran sales at Storigen and Cempaphore Systems.

Mike Nefkens

No month would be complete without a major executive change, addition or subtraction at HP. Mike Nefkens in early December was named executive vice president of HP Enterprise Services, a role he'd been filling on an interim basis for the previous few months.

Steve Watt

Meanwhile, Steve Watt, HP's chief Hadoop technologist, left in early December to take an as-yet-unspecified big data strategy position at Red Hat. The move was confirmed by Watt in his LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.

Richard Dyke

Flash memory storage provider Violin Memory in mid-December named Richard Dyke its new senior vice president, North American sales. Dyke joined from Riverbed, where he'd run worldwide sales for Riverbed's cloud storage business unit. Earlier in his career, Dyke spent 15 years at EMC and also worked for Storage Networks, Stentor and Radisphere.

Juniper VP Exits

There have been quite a few exits lately at Juniper Networks, including four vice president-level executives in the November and December time frames. All gone from the company as of the new year are Luc Ceuppens, former vice president, product marketing; Wendy Cartee, vice president, product and technical marketing; Venkat Nagaswamy, former vice president, worldwide marketing and solutions; and Rene Link, vice president, marketing and solutions, worldwide public sector. They joined a number of EVP-level departures from Juniper, which is in the process of restructuring operations.

Blake Irving

Blake Irving, the former Yahoo and Microsoft executive, was in mid-December named CEO of Web hosting company GoDaddy. The company, which was sold to an investment group in 2011, wants Irving to re-focus GoDaddy's product strategy. He replaces Scott Wagner, a member of Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts, who'd been running the company on an interim basis since July 2012.