Justin Richmond. (Photo via LinkedIn)

Former Expedia and Zulily executive Justin Richmond joined athletic clothing retailer Lululemon as the company’s chief strategy and digital officer, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Richmond left his position as the SVP and chief marketing officer of Seattle-based e-commerce company Zulily in March of 2017 and began working at Lululemon in January, remaining in the greater Seattle area, his profile says. Lululemon is headquartered in Vancouver, B.C., just a few hours north of Seattle.

Lululemon confirmed Richmond’s addition and that he will remain in Seattle.

Richmond’s addition isn’t the first time Lululemon has hired top executives in Seattle — former REI Chief Information Officer Julie Averill joined the company as executive vice president and chief technology officer in May of last year.

At the time, GeekWire reported that Averill was expected to stay in Seattle, despite Lululemon not having an official office in the city. It seems Richmond is in the same boat. Neither Richmond or Averill are listed on Lululemon’s management page.

Out-of-town retailers have increasingly been setting up new engineering and technology development centers in the region. Sears, Staples and Best Buy all have established engineering outposts in recent years.

John Ludeman. (Skytap Photo)

— Skytap, a fast-growing cloud services company that helps companies build modern software applications, added another Microsoft veteran to its leadership team.

John Ludeman, a former group engineering manager for Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, joined the company as its SVP of engineering. He joins Skytap from Nutanix, where he was the senior director of engineering, and boasts 30 years of engineering experience at Microsoft.

The move comes just a few months after the company announced it would allow customers to build applications on Amazon Web Services and hired former Microsoft VP Neil Holloway as its senior vice president of business development, pointing to a potential advance into Azure as well.

Ludeman’s addition makes that possibility even more likely. He told GeekWire in an email interview that he chose Skytap because of its unique approach to modernizing software applications that takes advantage of multiple clouds — and said there’s much more work to be done in the area.

“Modernizing applications is a complex, thorny problem that really needs to consider the whole life cycle of the application process. Skytap’s current success has been helping customers in the development, quality assurance, and training side of the equation. I’m looking forward to furthering this direction by finding creative ways for our cloud to bridge the gap between old and new, continue accelerating our development cadence, and improve our analytics, both internally and externally,” Ludeman said.

Seujan Bertram. (OpenMarket Photo)

OpenMarket, a developer of mobile messaging tools for public-facing brands, tapped former Starbucks and Tableau manager Seujan Bertram as its VP of global operations.

Bertram joins the company from Tableau, where she was most recently the director of global technical support programs and operations. She previously spent four years at Starbucks leading IT and engineering teams and was formerly a training and support manager at communications company WE for nearly seven years.

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