—Amazon.com’s top online advertising executive, Lisa Utzschneider, is leaving the company to join Yahoo, reports AdAge.
The news follows a report earlier this week by Kara Swisher at Re/code that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was actively recruiting Utzschneider, who helped build Amazon’s ad business into a powerhouse with revenue of $750 million last year, according to eMarketer. Prior to Amazon, she worked at Microsoft for 10 years in various sales roles.
It’s unclear what role Utzschneider is taking on at Yahoo, though Swisher speculated that she could fill the COO position left vacant by Henrique De Castro, was left in January.
Here’s Utzschneider talking with AdAge about her role at Amazon.
—Spoken Communications, a Seattle cloud company that specializes in services for customer support centers, has named Bromium co-founder and CTO Simon Crosby to its board of directors. Prior to Bromium, Crosby founder and served as CTO of XenSource, which was acquired by Citrix in 2007.
“Simon’s extensive experience in cloud computing and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will be invaluable as we continue to expand beyond our current offering,” said Howard Lee, CEO of Spoken Communications, in a statment. “Spoken’s cloud contact center services have been highly successful as a flexible, native cloud offering, and the next step is to expand that cloud infrastructure beyond the contact center to serve the entire enterprise.”
—Former Dow Jones CIO Stephen Orban has joined Amazon Web Services as enterprise strategy chief, a new role at the company. Orban, who helped launch Bloomberg Sports, said in a post on Medium that the rise of cloud computing is just beginning.
Using my own experiences and lessons learned in building a cloud-first enterprise, I will be working with enterprise technology executives to help them with this journey. I’ve had to work through the nuances of equipping a staff with new skills, building a DevOps organization, managing the transition of fixed capital expenses to variable operating expenses, influencing the executive team, and cloud design patterns, among others. I’m excited to share everything I’ve learned and I aspire to contribute to our customers’ success. At the same time, I will be among the growing number of voices inside of AWS advocating for the enterprise.
—Bsquare has named Martin L. Heimbigner as CFO, with the finance chief starting in the new role Nov. 3 He joins from Pacific CFO Group, and before that worked at Tatum LLC. He’s also held top financial roles at companies such as City Bank, Intelligent Results, Demand Media and Airbiquity. He’ll receive a base salary of $260,000 in the new role. “We are excited to have Marty join the company as our CFO. He brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to Bsquare at an important time in our evolution as a company,” said Jerry Chase, President and CEO, Bsquare.
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