30 Notable IT Executive Moves: September 2021

September saw new CEOs at StorMagic and WorkFusion and Kyndryl’s first COO. Google Cloud, Microsoft and AMD all announced new executive hires as well.

Edge computing services provider StorMagic, automation services provider WorkFusion and IBM’s upcoming Kyndryl spin-off all saw new C-suite hires during September.

Google Cloud, Microsoft and AMD were among other tech giants to make executive hires during the month as companies invest in resources for sales, technology and partners.

What follows are 30 notable IT executive moves from September 2021.

[RELATED: 30 Notable IT Executive Moves: August 2021 ]

Rich Hume

The historic merger between Synnex and Tech Data completed on Sept.1, creating an entity called TD Synnex with a combined $59.8 billion in revenue that takes over the top spot as the industry’s largest IT distributor, pushing rival Ingram Micro to the No. 2 position for the first time in over three decades.

Accordingly, Rich Hume, the CEO of the combined company and CEO of Tech Data starting in 2018, updated his LinkedIn account in September to reflect his new role. TD Synnex is based in Clearwater, Fla., and Fremont, Calif.

Hume will lead the combined company while Synnex President and CEO Dennis Polk will serve as the executive chair of the board of directors.

Hume joined Tech Data after 30-plus years at IBM. He left IBM in 2016 with the title of general manager and chief operating officer of Global Technology Services.

Lynn Comp

AMD last month hired a former Intel data center executive to lead the cloud business for the chipmaker’s EPYC processors as it seeks to take more server market share away from its top competitor.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company hired Lynn Comp, a 22-year Intel veteran, as corporate vice president of the Cloud Business Group. She will report to Dan McNamara, another Intel veteran who has been leading AMD’s Server Business Unit since the beginning of 2020.

Comp will oversee all go-to-market activities for cloud and mega data center customers. She will also drive the company’s customer engineering, optimization and benchmarking functions.

Her hiring comes a few months after the departure of Vladimir Rozanovich, who was AMD’s corporate vice president for mega data center and cloud sales. Rozanovich left the chipmaker to become president of Lenovo’s North America business. Around the same time, AMD hired Citrix veteran Brad Smith as corporate vice president of cloud sales.

Fidelma Russo

In September, Hewlett Packard Enterprise hired VMware Cloud Services General Manager Fidelma Russo as its new CTO as part of a stepped-up GreenLake edge-to-cloud Platform-as-a-Service development effort.

Russo, a 37-year technology industry veteran who has been overseeing VMware’s cloud services business unit for the last 17 months, will be responsible for managing the design, development and road map for GreenLake. HPE is based in Houston.

The appointment of Russo, who also spent six years as a Dell enterprise storage and software senior vice president, comes as HPE is in the middle of a “massive acceleration” of the GreenLake edge-to-cloud Platform-as-a-Service development effort.

HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri has promised that over the next six months HPE aims to take its edge-to-cloud Platform as a Service to new heights versus public cloud providers with a breakthrough GreenLake.HPE.com front end.

Dee Dee Acquista

Mandiant brought in former Proofpoint, SentinelOne and Beyond Trust channel chief Dee Dee Acquista to deepen the company’s presence beyond the large enterprise.

The Milpitas, Calif.-based cyberdefense and response vendor has tasked Acquista with getting solution providers more involved with selling Mandiant’s threat intelligence, security validation, and expertise on-demand offering. She served as channel chief of Proofpoint from 2013 to 2017.

Acquista will serve as Mandiant’s vice president of channel sales for the Americas and report into Wes Simons, senior vice president of sales for the Americas. Since Mandiant doesn’t have a global channel chief, Acquista will work with her counterparts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and Asia-Pacific to make sure there’s alignment with how the company goes to market in all geographies.

Harsh Chugh

Kyndryl, the upcoming spin-off of IBM’s managed infrastructure services business, named former IBM vice president and 20-year engineering and finance expert Harsh Chugh its chief operations officer in September.

Chugh comes to New York-based Kyndryl from cloud-based benefits administration technology provider PlanSource, where he worked for more than a year.

Prior to PlanSource, he spent more than 17 years at IBM, leaving in May 2020 with the title of vice president and functional COO of global markets, according to his LinkedIn bio. He joined the Armonk, N.Y.-based tech giant in 2002 as a senior consultant.

Kyndryl’s COO announcement comes shortly after many IBM employees updated their social media accounts on Sept. 1 to say they are now Kyndryl employees. Some employees have also been using Kyndryl.com email addresses.

Tom Gleason

Machine learning technology developer Domino Data Lab hired former Tableau Software and Avalara finance executive Tom Gleason last month as the company’s new CFO.

Gleason worked at Tableau for nine years, including serving as vice president of finance from October 2016 to August 2020. For the last year, he has worked at Avalara as vice president of finance and strategy.

His resume includes more than seven years with E&Y, leaving in 2010 as transaction advisory services manager, according to his LinkedIn bio.

His hiring comes as San Francisco-based Domino announced a $100 million Series F round of funding and is working to expand its product integration and joint sales partnership with processor designer Nvidia. Nvidia is also an investor in Domino and is a participant in the latest funding round.

Shaila Shankar

Shaila Shankar became leader of Cisco Systems’ Security Business Group in September after Gee Rittenhouse, Cisco’s security senior vice president for the last five years, exited the company.

Shankar is the first woman to lead the Cisco Security business, which is valued at more than $3.3 billion, according to the San Jose, Calif.-based company.

Shankar joined Cisco in June. Prior to her short tenure with the company, the longtime security leader spent a collective eight years at McAfee, most recently serving as senior vice president of engineering for the last two and a half years and three years as general manager of mobile and ISP solutions. She also spent more than six years as Intel‘s vice president of consumer and mobile engineering for the company’s security business.

As executive vice president and general manager of the Security Business Group, Shankar will report to Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president and general manager, security and collaboration.

Rittenhouse will stay on for several months to help with the transition, Cisco said.

Danial Beer

Danial Beer joined edge computing services provider StorMagic as CEO in September. The company—which is based in the U.K. and Charlotte, N.C.—offers purpose-built solutions and capabilities in the growing edge computing market.

Beer comes to StorMagic after serving as CEO of GFI Software for the past three years. Throughout his career, he has grown multinational software companies and divisions with annual revenue topping $500 million. Prior to GFI Software, Beer was chief customer success officer at Aurea Software. Before that, he was executive director of both the performance management and mergers and acquisitions division at IBM.

StorMagic is looking to leverage Beer’s more than 25 years of top executive experience in the software industry to become a leading storage and security player in the fast-growing edge computing market.

Janet Hoffman

Google Cloud hired Janet Hoffman last month as vice president of customer cloud experience, according to her LinkedIn account.

Hoffman comes to the Mountain View, Calif.-based cloud giant after more than 23 years on and off with Accenture. She left Accenture in September with the title of senior managing director, products operating group, America west region, according to her LinkedIn bio. In this role, she grew “our Products practice for the Life Sciences, Retail, Consumer Goods, Automotive, Travel and Transportation industries” and worked with Fortune 1000 clients.

In February, she began to lead “a new multidisciplinary Vaccine Management solution set serving commercial clients in North America” for Accenture, according to her LinkedIn account. Her team’s services included vaccine scheduling, administration, essential workers vaccine verification and employee health portals. She previously served as global managing director of Accenture‘s retail practice.

Adam Famularo

Adam Famularo became CEO of New York-based automation services company WorkFusion in September, according to a statement.

Before joining WorkFusion, Famularo was CEO of Erwin, a data modeling software provider. He joined Erwin in 2016 with the goal of adding hundreds of new partners, helping existing partners grow their businesses and continuing to develop the company’s product set as a big data mainstay.

Quest Software bought the company—a spin-off from CA—from private equity firm Parallax Capital Partners in January.

Famularo previously held channel leadership roles at Verizon Business and CA Technologies, according to his LinkedIn bio. He left Verizon in 2016 with the title of vice president of global channels. At Verizon, he was “responsible for overseeing indirect enterprise distribution channels—partners, value-added resellers and systems integrators—across the U.S., EMEA, the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America.”

He left CA in 2014 after spending about 16 years with the company, according to his LinkedIn bio. He left with the title of senior vice president of partner sales and was “responsible for developing new business partnerships that will lead to further adoption of CA Technologies software.” His leave was reportedly due to conflict over the strategic direction of the indirect channel, sources told CRN at the time.

Srini Kandala

In September, Srini Kandala returned to Salesforce, becoming vice president of software engineering, data platform and services at Salesforce subsidiary Tableau, according to his LinkedIn bio.

Kandala previously worked at San Francisco-based CRM software provider Salesforce from 2015 to 2019, leaving with the title of senior director of security engineering, according to LinkedIn. In this role, he led “the Security detection and Analytics engineering team, where we collect, process, analyze billions of log data that are fed to threat intelligence and behavioral analytics engines.”

Between his Salesforce stints, Kandala served as head of engineering for the big data platform and shared services at Motorola Solutions. His responsibilities at Motorola included leading “the Innovations team that works on cutting edge projects using AI/ML for public safety like near real time transcription of emergency calls, NLP, video analytics for identity/object recognition.”

He also served as vice president of software engineering for customer identity and access management at Discovery in between his Salesforce roles, according to his LinkedIn account. His resume includes director of technology at Expedia Group, director of engineering and operations at Nordstrom and principal engineering manager at Microsoft.

Steve Johnson

Anexinet hired Steve Johnson as president in September to “support the company‘s strong acquisition momentum” and align “new levels of technical competency and business acumen with the existing client-focused execution—for a decisive competitive advantage,” according to a statement.

Johnson joins the Blue Bell, Pa.-based company—No. 213 on CRN’s 2021 Solution Provider 500—from its private equity owner Mill Point Capital, where he was an executive partner focused on Anexinet.

For about a year, he served as CEO of GraytCloud, a company focused on “enabling solution providers to bridge the gap between current skills and the skills needed to enable transformation and automation,” according to his LinkedIn bio. The company provides services to VARs and its distribution network.

For seven-plus years, Johnson served as CEO of Corus360, a member of CRN’s 2021 Tech Elite 250. He left the company in 2020, according to his LinkedIn bio.

Emily He

In September, Emily He joined Microsoft as corporate vice president of business applications marketing, according to her LinkedIn bio.

In this role, her responsibilities include the global go-to-market strategy and marketing of the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant’s Dynamics 365 enterprise resource planning and CRM product and Microsoft’s Power Platform product for business intelligence and low-code application development, according to her LinkedIn account.

She previously worked at Oracle for four-plus years, leaving as senior vice president of global marketing. Her responsibilities at Oracle included “global GTM strategy, brand awareness and demand generation of the global Cloud Human Capital Management business.”

Earlier in her career, He worked at Siebel Systems, leaving the CRM software provider in 2006 with the title of senior director of product marketing. Oracle closed its $5.85 billion acquisition of Siebel that year.

Christian Paulus

Veeam Software hired Christian Paulus in September as vice president of product and solutions marketing, according to his LinkedIn bio.

Before joining Columbus, Ohio-based Veeam, Paulus worked for about two years at Kong, leaving as head of product marketing. Before Kong, Paulus worked at cloud data management vendor Cohesity, leaving in 2019 with the title of vice president of product and solutions marketing.

Paulus spent two-plus years with Cloudflare, leaving in 2018 as head of product marketing, according to his LinkedIn bio. While at the internet performance and security services provider, he helped to grow revenue to $192.7 million in annual recurring revenue and orchestrated go-to-market across self-serve, small to midsize and enterprise customers as well as partners. He also helped to increase the customer base to more than 10 million by launching 19 new services.

He spent four-plus years at VMware, leaving in 2016 as senior director of product marketing, enterprise cloud and development operations management, according to his LinkedIn bio. At the virtualization giant, he helped to drive $883 million in total bookings, helped to drive product marketing for multiple lines including vCloud Suite, vRealize Suite and VMware Integrated Openstack. He also led go to market for the cloud automation line of business.

Doug Hudson

Doug Hudson joined Orca Security last month as vice president of business development, according to his LinkedIn bio.

His hiring came just before the Los Angeles-based cloud security startup announced a $210 million funding round led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, and Redpoint Ventures. The Series C round makes Orca Security the fastest cybersecurity company in history to achieve a $1 billion valuation.

Before Orca, Hudson worked for six-plus years at cybersecurity company Coalfire Systems. He left in June with the title of managing principal.

Hudson previously worked at Accenture for three-plus years, leaving in 2015 as an enterprise security architect, manager. In this role, he “supported and directed delivery of Accenture‘s security offerings including governance, strategy, and risk (assessment and management),” according to his LinkedIn bio.

For six-plus years, he worked at 5280 Networks, leaving in 2010 as a consulting director. As part of his role, he “directed mid-market consultants, managed project budgets, created project scopes, and developed strategic new products and services,” according to Hudson’s LinkedIn bio.

Joe Schweitzer

Joe Schweitzer returned to Atos last month, taking the title vice president of operations. Atos is No. 24 CRN’s 2021 Solution Provider 500.

Schweitzer previously worked at France-based Atos from 2013 to 2016, leaving with the title of vice president and head of operations for North America, according to his LinkedIn.

During this time, he directed IT operations, including service desk, cloud, server hosting and data center, according to his LinkedIn bio. He managed an offshore delivery team, helped to drive the company from negative margin to 10 percent in 12 months through a financial and operational turnaround on a large account and helped integrate Xerox’s IT outsourcing business into Atos, which bought the business in 2014 for about $1 billion.

He returns to Atos after more than two years with Health First, a health-care service company. As Health First’s vice president of information technology, his role included devising IT strategies for the company’s application portfolio, data management, overseeing a staff of 70 associates and managing a $25 million annual budget, according to his LinkedIn.

Nicholas Holian

Wipro Technologies, No. 16 on CRN’s 2021 Solution Provider 500, hired Nicholas Holian last month as global chief technology officer and general manager of its iCORE business line, according to his LinkedIn bio.

Holian joins the India-based company after four-plus years with DXC Technology. He left DXC in August as chief technology officer of the Americas region, according to his LinkedIn bio.

Before DXC, he served as a chief and distinguished technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. During his time with HPE, he helped to develop the global product life-cycle management practice and designed a new high-performance computing cluster for an oil and gas company in Brazil.

Holian also worked for HP for eight-plus years after the company bought Compaq for about $20 billion in 2002.

Praveena Varadarajan

In September, IBM hired Praveena Varadarajan as a vice president and senior partner, giving her a key role over the tech giant’s hybrid cloud transformation strategy, according to her LinkedIn account.

Varadarajan joins Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM from Amazon Web Services, where she served as global AWS modernization practice leader, according to her LinkedIn bio. She worked at AWS for more than a year.

Prior to AWS, Varadarajan worked at credit scoring company FICO for about 10 years. She left in 2019 as vice president of product engineering. In this role, she worked to “build a secure cloud product engineering platform,” according to her LinkedIn bio. She “led the design, development and deployment of a SaaS solution offered through the FICO Decision Management Platform and Strategy Director product suite” during her time with the company.

She also worked at Oracle for more than two years, leaving in 2010 as a director. At Oracle, she “managed a standardized on-demand engineering platform that offered a secure Cloud platform for Oracle’s on-demand solution offering,” according to her LinkedIn bio.

Aaron Millstone

NTT Data Services hired Aaron Millstone last month as its divisional president of digital transformation services.

Millstone will focus on digital transformation through modern applications, data intelligence and automation, cloud transformation, customer experience and enterprise application services, according to a statement from the Japan-based solution provider—No. 8 on CRN’s 2021 Solution Provider 500.

Millstone previously led Oracle’s North American cloud strategic services and partner organization, according to the statement. His resume also includes 23 years with Accenture.

According to his LinkedIn bio, Millstone worked with Oracle’s ecosystem of partners, managed service providers and cloud service providers to help customers with cloud infrastructure.

He left Accenture in 2018 with the title of managing director, according to his LinkedIn bio. He ran the “the High Performance Enterprise offering group which delivers solutions that improve efficiency and effectiveness while focusing on shifting organizations to digitally enabled enterprises across multiple markets in the USA and Canada.”

Jim Blenderman

In September, CompassMSP—a member of CRN’s 2021 MSP 500—hired Jim Blenderman as vice president of sales operations, according to his LinkedIn bio.

In this role, Blenderman “is responsible for driving new revenue acquisition,” according to the website of West Hartford, Conn.-based CompassMSP. “This includes CompassMSP’s strategy for finding new clients, coaching and developing the sales force, and creating a great initial experience for our prospective customers as they go through our process.”

In July, CompassMSP CEO Ari Santiago told CRN in an interview that the company is “aggressively” driving its SMB market reach on the East Coast, hence the recent acquisition of Tarrytech Computer Consultants.

Blenderman’s resume includes six-plus years with Xerox Business Solutions. He left the company in 2019 with the title of sales director, according to his LinkedIn bio.

Martin Henderson

GuidePoint Security, a member of CRN’s 2021 MSP 500, hired Martin Henderson in September as senior vice president of Southwest.

In this role, he will lead expansion into new markets in the region, according to a statement from the Herndon, Va.-based company.

Henderson has 25-plus years of information security and strategic services experience, according to GuidePoint’s website. He spent more than 10 years with Netwitness in strategic roles. Before Netwitness, he led sales teams and advised customers on advanced security platforms and services for various companies for about 15 years.

EMC Corp. bought Netwitness in 2011 and integrated it with RSA Security. Dell bought EMC for $67 billion in 2016.

According to his LinkedIn bio, he worked at security software company Websense for about six years, leaving in 2011 with the title of strategic account manager. Websense changed its name to Forcepoint in 2016.

Rick Gonzalez

ECS Federal—No. 52 on CRN’s 2021 Solution Provider 500—hired Rick Gonzalez in September as vice president of managed services, according to his LinkedIn bio.

Gonzalez comes to Fairfax, Va.-based ECS from CGI Federal, where he served in various roles over nine years, most recently holding the title of director of consulting services, according to his LinkedIn bio. His responsibilities included managing a team of 100-plus full-time employees across six sites and locations in the U.S., working to meet federal security and service compliance.

Before CGI Federal, he worked at solution provider Chenega Corp. for about 14 years, leaving in 2012 with the title of vice president of enterprise solutions. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps for about 13 years, obtaining the rank of major, according to his LinkedIn bio.

Matthew Taylor

Last month, Matthew Taylor joined SambaNova Systems—which CRN named one of “the 10 hottest semiconductor startups of 2021 (so far)” in June—as vice president of strategic sales and partnerships, according to his LinkedIn bio.

Taylor’s responsibilities at Palo Alto, Calif.-based SambaNova include “leading a team to advance the adoption of SambaNova Dataflow-as-a-Service among the next wave of cloud providers” and “developing an ecosystem of partners to empower enterprises and organizations across the world,” according to his LinkedIn bio.

He previously worked at Qualcomm for about three years, leaving in 2018 with the title of vice president of sales and business development, according to his LinkedIn bio. Among his accomplishments at Qualcomm, Taylor hired and led teams for sales, business development and support and negotiated master purchase agreements for hardware and software.

Before Qualcomm, he spent more than 11 years with Intel. He left in 2015 with the title of managing director of the Amazon global account team, according to his LinkedIn bio. In this role, Taylor managed a 30-plus-person team responsible for Intel’s relationship with Amazon. He helped to grow revenue from $200 million to $1.5 billion in three years and collaborated with AWS “to develop the first custom Xeon CPU for a cloud service provider.”

Jim Clark

Jim Clark joined Cloudera in September as vice president of product management for the company’s public cloud offering, according to his LinkedIn account.

Clark joins Santa Clara, Calif.-based Cloudera from data management software provider MarkLogic.

He worked at MarkLogic for about eight years. In his final role with MarkLogic, vice president of engineering, Clark provided “the strategy and directed the development and delivery of MarkLogic‘s cloud services and on-premises product lines,” according to his LinkedIn bio. He led “teams including product engineering, product management, the company’s developer community, training/UX/documentation, and security.”

Clark also spent about two years with Discern, leaving in 2013 as the vice president of product development and engineering. His resume also includes nine years with Oracle. He left Oracle in 2006 as director of global program management, enterprise support services.

Cloudera is expected to go private before the end of the year in a $5.3 billion acquisition deal by private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and global investment company KKR.

Cary Bush

Last month, Cary Bush joined telecommunications company Ooma as senior channel sales manager, according to a statement.

Bush is responsible for “serving the central US as the primary sales resource for our channel partners” at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, according to his LinkedIn bio.

He has 20-plus years of experience working with VARs, MSPs, systems integrators and independent software vendors, according to an Ooma statement. He comes to Ooma from Aircall, a cloud-based call center and phone system services provider, where he established the company’s first channel program in North America.

Before Aircall, Bush worked at Meridian for about a year and business communications company CafeX Communications for about a year, according to his LinkedIn bio. At CafeX, he “launched a global channel program in early 2017 with Microsoft Dynamics 365 partners enabling them to add omnichannel customer engagement strategies to their professional services practice.” He helped to grow the program to 80 active partners worldwide in the first year.

Ashley Stirrup

Shoreline.io, a development operations (DevOps) incident automation company based in Redwood City, Calif., hired Ashley Stirrup as chief operating officer in September, according to a company statement.

Stirrup will “be responsible for driving growth initiatives and scaling business operations to support Shoreline’s rapid customer adoption,” according to the statement. He will also join the board of directors.

He has 28 years of experience in sales, marketing and channel programs, according to the statement. Before Shoreline, he worked at search and discovery software provider Algolia as chief marketing officer for about two years.

Before Alogia, he was CMO of Talend. He worked at data integration company Talend for about five years, helping grow the company from $60 million to $200 million and assisting in the company going public in 2016.

Stirrup’s resume also includes a year with Citrix as group vice president of marketing for the delivery systems division and a role as general manager with Siebel Systems’ sales product suite, according to LinkedIn.

Amy Mahoney

In September, enterprise software company Databricks hired Amy Mahoney as vice president of global partner sales, according to her LinkedIn account.

Before joining San Francisco-based Databricks, Mahoney worked at Salesforce for 11-plus years. Her most recent title with the company was senior vice president of the Americas, according to her LinkedIn account.

Prior to Salesforce, Mahoney worked at business-to-business pricing and sales software company Zilliant for about a year as director of business development. She also spent more than two years with Emptoris, leaving in 2009 as a senior alliance manager, according to her LinkedIn bio. IBM bought Emptoris in 2011.

Mahoney joined Databricks just after the company acquired 8080 Labs and its low-code/no-code data analysis technology.

Vineet Goel

Intel hired Vineet Goel last month as vice president and general manager of graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture and IP engineering, according to his LinkedIn account.

He joined Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel from AMD, where he worked for more than five years, most recently with the title of corporate vice president of GPU architecture, graphics, machine learning and mobile platform, according to his LinkedIn.

Prior to AMD, Goel worked at Qualcomm for more than five years. He left in 2016 with the title of director of GPU compute solution and Adreno architecture.

He arrives as the rivalry between AMD and Intel continues to heat up, with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger recently telling CRN that AMD’s days of claiming CPU dominance are coming to an end.