Movers and shakers: New CIO, post-CIO and CEO roles

Peter McDowall, former St John ICT director, joins Microsoft New Zealand as cloud delivery executive, reporting to Nicola Ferguson, support practice manager.

Simon Gillespie joins Gen-i as general manager corporate clients. The former Dimension Data CEO replaces Steve Mills, who moved into the newly created role of general manager client delivery and operations.

Former Australian Government CIO Glenn Archer is joining Gartner as research vice president in its public sector research group. Archer will advise Gartner’s senior government technology and executive clients globally. His primary research will be on the rapid transition to digital service delivery by governments.

Matjaz Jug resigns as CIO of Statistics New Zealand. He will be initially based in Slovenia, doing consultancy work on big data for international organisations. Chris Buxton now heads ICT at the government agency.

Andrew Crabb resigns from Vodafone as head of enterprise solutions and services, and will leave the company in mid-June. He joined the executive team of Vodafone through the telco’s acquisition of TelstraClear, where he was head of business and government sales.

Lynley Lee has moved to Nelson, and now heads Peritia Consulting. The former CIO at AsureQuality works with small to medium sized businesses, and is an associate with two companies.

Her advice to CIOs looking for a similar career shift: “Think about what you can contribute along the way. The IT discipline teaches you a lot but you have to have business understanding, you have to speak really well with business people.”

Alma Hong is leaving the NZ Fire Service as ICT director after six years, and is taking a sabbatical.

Leanne Gibson is now CIO at Wellington International Airport. Before taking on the newly created role, she was CIO at Ministry of Education for over five years.

Claudia Vidal is now general manager for IB4T, a technology and software company servicing leading automobile brands.

Darren Wiseman is now IT manager at Toyota Financial Services, following a similar role at Hesketh Henry.

Peter Yates is now head of operations and infrastructure for Telecom Digital Ventures.

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Pam Nobbs moves to manufacturer The Comfort Group as head of IT.

Scott McCool has been promoted to group vice president of information technology and CIO at Polycom. McCool joined Polycom in July 2013 as vice president of information technology and chief information security officer. Prior to joining Polycom, McCool directed global infrastructure engineering at Brocade.

Gavin Jones is appointed managing director Australia and New Zealand for Pivotal. It is a newly created role, and he will report to Melissa Ries, vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific region. Before joining Pivotal, Jones was the vice president and general manager for Good Technology.

Cigna New Zealand appoints Lance Walker as its new CEO based in Wellington, succeeding Gail Costa who was promoted to CEO for developed and developing markets for Cigna International in Hong Kong. Walker was most recently CEO of Loyalty New Zealand which operates Fly Buys.

Quentin Long, cloud solutions engineer at Fronde, is the first winner of the “My PRTG Dashboard” competition by network monitoring solutions provider Paessler AG. The contest recognises the most extraordinary and creative PRTG dashboards. Long uses the PRTG Dashboard to offer a visually appealing display for Fronde’s partners including Amazon Web Services and its customers.

Kogan.com, a major online retailer in Australia, launches in New Zealand. “Most retailers sign exclusive distribution agreements with their suppliers. We don’t do this," says its founder and CEO Ruslan Kogan in a statement. “We have built a proprietary cloud based system that makes the leading distributors from around the world bid on a daily basis to win our orders. As a result of this, our distributors know that no matter how many football games and concerts they offer to take us to, they’ll only win our orders if they are the cheapest for that product on that day.”

Data security provider Vormetric launches in Australia and New Zealand and appoints Damian Harvey as country manager.

"Data is the new currency. Whether you’re talking personal records, credit details, medical records, blueprints to a proprietary device – data is valuable to criminals and other actors. Everything from Snowden to the major retail breaches is confirming that cybersecurity has been focussing on the wrong thing, working from the outside to the inside, instead of the other way around,” says Harvey. “As a digital economy and society, we urgently need to adopt a ‘data-centric’ model and move away from the illusion that perimeter security is working.”

He joins Vormetric from Oracle, where he most recently served as ANZ sales leader for Oracle virtualisation and specialist security products.

Send news on ICT executive appointments to divina_paredes@idg.co.nz

Follow Divina Paredes on Twitter: @divinap

Follow CIO New Zealand on Twitter:@cio_nz

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