25 Notable IT Executive Moves: March 2011

March Moving and Shaking

January and February were both packed with notable IT executive moves, lending credence to the idea that some of the industry's top managers -- and their companies -- are getting restless coming out of the economic downturn. March's crop of executive comings and goings didn't slow that momentum, either, and on the last day of the month came one of its biggest surprises.

Gianfranco Lanci

He's credited with growing Acer into the world's No. 2 PC maker by shipments behind HP, but that wasn't enough to keep Lanci in Acer's driver's seat. On the last day of March, Acer confirmed Lanci had resigned following a clash with Acer's board.

"They placed different levels of importance on scale, growth, customer value creation, brand position enhancement, and on resource allocation and methods of implementation," according to Acer. Former CEO and current chairman J.T. Wang will fill Lanci's role on an interim basis while the company shops for a new leader.

Adrian Jones

No sooner did former HP CEO Mark Hurd exit HP and turn up at Oracle than rumors about Hurd's former channel chief joining him at Oracle began to surface. Turns out, it was true: in mid-March, Adrian Jones was confirmed by sources to be taking over as senior vice president of Asia Pacific/Japan at Oracle. Jones' most recent role at HP was senior vice president of Enterprise Storage, Servers and Networking for HP Asia Pacific, but Jones left HP in February.

Anand Chandrasekher

Anand Chandrasekher spent 24 years at Intel, but it was not enough to keep him for a 25th. Chandrasekher in mid-March was confirmed to be leaving Intel to "pursue other interests," opening a vacancy in his post as senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group. Mike Bell and Dave Whalen, both vice presidents in Intel's Architecture Group, were appointed to co-manage the UMG.

Frank Hauck

A number of EMC and Cisco executives have already made the move to VCE, the joint venture of Cisco, EMC and VMware, and well-known EMC-er Frank Hauck is another. Hauck was in late March confirmed to be moving over as president of VCE, where he'll report to Michael Capellas, VCE's chairman and CEO. Hauck's most recent title at EMC is executive vice president, and he's also a member of EMC's executive office of the chairman. At VCE, he'll focus on customer service, new product delivery and new technologies, according to sources.

Bertrand Serlet

He's been the top Mac OS executive at Apple for a good long time, but as of mid-March, it was time for Apple's Bertrand Serlet to exit. A 14-year Apple veteran, and said to be close to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Serlet said in a vaguely-worded statement that he wanted to "focus less on products and more on science." Serlet and Jobs go back more than two decades; Serlet worked at the Jobs-founded NeXT before its acquisition by Apple. Craig Federighi, vice president of Mac Software Engineering, is assuming Serlet's role and will report to Jobs.

James Gosling

While details of what he'll be doing there aren't yet confirmed, James Gosling is headed to Google. Gosling, a former vice president and fellow at Sun Microsystems and the "father of Java" thanks to his original design for the Java programming language, confirmed the move in a blog post.

"I don't know what I'll be working on," he said. "I expect it'll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon."

Gosling left Oracle-Sun in April 2010.

Mike Wolfe

Onward and upward for Mike Wolfe: the former HP executive was named CIO of Advanced Micro Devices. A 30-year industry veteran, Wolfe was vice president of IT for product development and engineering at HP. At AMD, he'll oversee the company's technology infrastructure, and report to interim CEO Thomas Seifert.

Kieran Harty

Room for innovation in the storage and virtualization worlds knows no bounds. Just ask Kieran Harty, who unveiled a new startup, Tintri, where he is co-founder and CEO. Harty, the former head of R&D at VMware, said he founded Tintri in 2008 to focus on the costs of connecting storage to virtualized environments. Tintri's first product is an appliance that can manage hundreds of virtual machines and their storage needs while making the device seem like a simple direct-attached storage array.

Keith Pardy

It's over-and-out for Keith Pardy, who exited his post as Research In Motion's chief marketing officer early in March. RIM has not yet named a successor for Pardy, whose departure comes just ahead of the launch of RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and other debuts designed to buoy RIM in the mobile computing space. Pardy first joined RIM in 2009 from Nokia.

David White

David White, Nvidia's CFO, resigned unexpectedly in mid-March, citing personal reasons. Nvidia named Karen Burns, Nvidia's corporate controller and vice president of tax, to replace White on an interim basis, while White plans to remain on Nvidia's board to help with the transition.

Extreme Additions

As Oscar Rodriguez adjusts into the role of CEO of Extreme Networks, he's also wasting no time building his executive team. Among notable recent recruits are David Ginsburg, the new senior vice president of strategic marketing, and this month came two new additions. Jim Judson was named interim chief financial officer following the departure of former CFO and interim CEO Bob Corey, and Edward Meyercord was named independent board chairman, succeeding former chairman and Extreme co-founder Gordon Stitt.

Paul Brubaker

Paul Brubaker is best known to channel partners as a former Cisco executive, and now he's heading the consulting route. Brubaker in late March was confirmed as COO at Synteractive, a D.C.-based consulting firm, where he'll focus on business development and execution, as well as oversee applications and platforms related to enterprise migration to cloud computing. At Cisco, Brubaker headed the networking titan's public sector Internet Business Solutions Group, and was formerly subcommittee staff director in the U.S. Senate and deputy defense department CIO for the Government Accountability Office.

Suresh Vasudevan

Suresh Vasudevan was confirmed as the new CEO of Nimble Storage, following two years on the company's board. A nearly 10-year veteran of NetApp, Vasudevan was most recently the chief executive at Omneon, a digital storage specialist for the media industry that was acquired by Harmonic at the end of 2010. He joins Nimble Storage, which makes converged storage and backup solutions, at a time when the startup has more than tripled its revenue and gained cachet in enterprises.

Ron Gaboury and David Phillips

York Telecom, a top visual communications and managed services solution provider in Eatentown, N.J., has a new CEO and a new president and COO. Ronald Gaboury, who held the president and COO seat for 12 years, became CEO, succeeding York Telecom founder York Wang. Behind Gaboury is David Phillips, who will run York Telecom's day-to-day business and be responsible for its strategic plan as president and COO. Phillips is perhaps bet known in the channel for the two and a half years he spent as senior vice president, worldwide sales at Polycom, and before that, he was himself COO at a VAR, ACS Dataline.

Rick Lindner

As the chief financial officer of AT&T, Rick Lindner's seen his fair share of intensity in the cutthroat telecom service provider arena. Lindner's upcoming retirement was announced in early March; he'll step down from AT&T on June 1, to be replaced by current AT&T Controller John Stephens. Lindner has been CFO at AT&T since 2004, and a presence through some of its biggest recent moves, including the proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA.

Richard Wilmer

Count solid-state storage device vendor Pliant among those vendors with new leaders. Pliant confirmed Richard Wilmer its new CEO in mid-March, also announcing the retirement of current CEO Amyl Ahola, expected to remain on Pliant's board. Wilmer is a 25-year industry veteran, and he was most recently COO and acting CFo for Santur Corp., as well as vice president of business operations and vice president of engineering at Aruba Networks, and a veteran of Seagate, Maxtor, 2Wire, Procket Networks and Terastor.

Robert Kimball

Robert Kimball took over as CEO of RealNetworks in early 2010, but a little more than a year later, he's stepping down. In late March, Kimball confirmed he would leave the company, saying in a statement that after "12 amazing years at Real, it is time for me to find new challenges and opportunities."

Kimball states that he took over as CEO to lead a restructuring of RealNetworks, following the January 2010 departure of CEO Rob Glaser after 16 years. Now that the business is simplified -- Kimball said Real has eliminated $70 million in annualized operating expenses -- he's passing the baton. Mike Lunsford, Real's executive vice president, is serving as interim CEO while a permanent chief is sought.

Dave Singhal

From Cisco to MIPS: Dave Singhal was confirmed in mid-March as the new vice president of corporate development at MIPS Technologies. A veteran of the semiconductor industry, Singhal was most recently a director in Cisco's corporate development and strategy group. At MIPS, he'll report to CEO Sandeep Vij, and focus on expansion and strategic initiatives for the company. While at Cisco, Singhal also worked in the Chief Architect's Office for the Service Proivder Group, and before his time there was CEO at Luxxon Corp.

Kazuo Hirai

Is Kazuo Hirai the heir apparent at Sony? It certainly looks that way following the news in mid-March that he would be promoted to a new Sony unit combining various consumer electronics, setting up to potentially succeed Howard Stringer as CEO. Hirai, who is widely credited with boosting Sony's PlayStation consoles business during his tenture, will also take on Bravia TVs and Vaio laptops in his new role.

Aaron Barr

It's been a tough stretch for HBGary Federal. CEO Aaron Barr stepped down in late February as the threat of a Congressional investigation into the security firm loomed. HBGary, which has spent a few months trying to unmask members of the hacker group Anonymous, notably pulled out of the RSA 2011 security conference after claiming to have received "numerous threats of violence" against employees.

Clearwire Shakeup

Clearwire announced in mid-March that CEO Bill Morrow would step down, and be replaced on an interim basis by Chairman John Stanton. Morrow's resignation was for unspecified personal reasons, and he plans to stay as an advisor to Clearwire during the transition. It'll be another step-up for Stanton, who has been a Clearwire board member since 2008, and in January of this year replaced Clearwire founder Craig McCaw as board chairman.

Clearwire confirmed additional moves, as well. Mike Sievert, chief commercial officer, and Kevin Hart, CIO, are both on the way out, and Erik Prusch, Clearwire's CFO, took the newly created position of COO, with Hope Cochran, senior vice president and treasurer, replacing Prusch as CFO.

Bob Binns

Solgenia SpA doesn't have a big presence in North America, and Bob Binns is the man tasked with changing that. Binns was named CEO for Canada and USA in mid-March, to be based in Toronto. Binns, whose long career includes executive positions with IBM, Microsoft, Bank of Montreal and Unisys.

As for Solgenia, based in Spoleto, Italy, it's been around since 1990 as a provider of enterprise business applications like ERP, supply chain management, content management and business analytics, and has a robust network of channel partners in Europe and through strategic relationships with vendors like Microsoft, HP, Cisco and Oracle. It's made several recent acquisitions to enter into North American markets, including of Canadian solution provider Microset Systems in March.

Jennifer Anaya

NetEnrich, an IT infrastructure services provider, named Jennifer Anaya vice president of corporate marketing. Well-known to channel partners and channel media for her roles in public relations and marketing with Ingram Micro and other clients, Anaya was previously marketing strategist at iD8 Marketing/Strategy, a Long Beach, Calif.-based marketing firm. Anaya had NetEnrich as a client at ID8, and former Ingram Micro services executive Justin Crotty is now senior vice president and general manager at NetEnrich.

More AMD Maneuvers

AMD in late March confirmed a changing of the guard in its Latin America region: former Samsung executive Ronaldo Miranda is the new vice president and general manager there. Miranda replaced Hans Erickson, who is moving to AMD's Austin, Texas headquarters to take over as vice president of worldwide business management. Miranda is a seasoned channel executive, having spent 10 years with AMD archrival Intel building Intel's channel presence in Brazil, and at Samsung, he was vice president for Samsung's local IT product division.

HP Maneuvers

Several additional moves in the HP corporate mix: Tracy Keogh was named executive vice president of human resources, and Brian Humphries to the role of senior vice president, Growth Markets Organization. Humphries' role is particularly intriguing; the GMO is a newly created HP unit, and he'll lead a time focused on creating "specialized go-to-market strategies, technology solutions and customer, partner and public sector relationships that meet the unique needs of rapidly developing markets." Humphries was most recently senior vice president of strategy and corporate development at HP, while Keogh, who will report to HP President and CEO Leo Apotheker, was most recently senior vice president of human resources at Hewitt Associates.