A number of companies have announced major changes to their executive leadership this month. Here are a couple of the moves across the industry this past month.
Couchbase names Julie Irish as new chief information officer
As chief information officer, she will be responsible for driving the company’s global IT strategy, bringing with her almost 20 years of experience in leading IT organizations, including system implementation, business operations, migrations, and strategic planning.
She comes from New Relic, where she was the vice president of business applications and IT, leading the company’s switch to a consumption-based business model. She has also held leadership positions at Harvard Business Publishing and RichRelevance.
“Julie’s appointment marks a key milestone in the next phase of Couchbase’s expansion, and we’re very pleased to welcome her as our first CIO,” said Matt Cain, chair, president and CEO of Couchbase. “With an excellent track record and deep expertise in technology innovation, Julie’s leadership will further enable our world-class team as we scale beyond inflection and unlock the next phase of our growth with our database-as-a-service Couchbase Capella.”
Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan join Microsoft to work on Copilot
Suleyman is the co-founder of the AI companies DeepMind and Inflection, and Simonyan co-founded and is the chief scientist at Inflection.
At Microsoft, Suleyman will be the EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI and Simonyan will be the chief scientist. Microsoft AI is a new organization within Microsoft dedicated to advancing Copilot and the company’s other AI initiatives. However, the company stated that Kevin Scott will still continue to be CTO and EVP of AI and will work on general AI strategy.
“There is no franchise value in our industry and the work and product innovation we drive at this moment will define the next decade and beyond. Let us use this opportunity to build world-class AI products, like Copilot, that are loved by end-users! This is about science, engineering, product, and design coming together and embracing a learning mindset to push our innovation culture and product building process forward in fundamental ways,” Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.
Vultr appoints Amit Rai as general manager of AI and Enterprise Cloud, Nathan Goulding as SVP of Engineering
Rai will be focused on expanding the company’s AI strategy and footprint, while Goulding will accelerate the company’s product roadmap.
Rai previously held roles at ZoomInfo, Infosys, Fidelity, Qualcomm, Model N, and EverString. Goulding has a long career working in cloud infrastructure at companies like Equinix, Voxel, Internap, and Packet.
“Both Amit and Nathan bring long-tenured experience and proven success building and scaling enterprise technology platforms and businesses. Their experience and leadership will help Vultr deliver on our mission to make high-performance cloud computing easy to use, affordable, and locally accessible for businesses and developers around the world,” said J.J. Kardwell, CEO of Vultr’s parent company, Constant.
Christopher Hall promoted to chief product officer at Precisely
Christopher Hall will be responsible for the data integrity company’s product strategy and roadmaps for products like the Data Integrity Suite.
He was previously the company SVP of product and operations at the company, and in that role he led the vision for the Engage portfolio. He joined the company because he had been working at Pitney Bowes at the time that Precisely acquired it.
He has over two decades of experience of being a senior leader at tech companies, including Red Ventures, Imagitas, Sharecare, Eventful, The Active Network, and AOL.
