In a sector like Software-as-a-Service where it is often the quality of the management that matters just as much as the technology they provide, it is useful to keep track of moves between, into and out of the main industry players.
At Aconex, for example, the business has a new CFO, Paul Koppelman, who took over the reins from Stephen Recht in February 2017 – the same month when a new chief technology officer, Craig Fulton, was appointed (post) to work with co-founder Rob Phillpot. In the Middle East, Aconex has appointed Baraq Hadi, previously vice president at Bentley Systems, as general manager of the Middle East – reporting (like former BIW and Conject executive now UK and Ireland general manager Steve Cooper) to Henry Jones, senior vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and global accounts. And I recently met the business’s new EMEA marketing chief Jan Jivmark (formerly EMEA marketing director at IntraLinks, and, before that, head of marketing at Acronis).
Jivmark will presumably be reporting to Gabriele Famous, announced this week as Aconex’s new Chief Marketing Officer. Famous was previously VP, Global Product Marketing at Zendesk, and held leadership positions at Salesforce so has, as Aconex CEO Leigh Jasper says, “proven track record in Software as a Service marketing”.
Other people moves
According to a March 2017 news release [now deleted], former COINS, BIW, Conject and Textura Europe CEO Colin Smith became the new CEO at Buckinghamshire, UK-based Causeway Technologies, with the previous CEO Phil Brown taking a more strategic role as chairman. Causeway provides a broad range of construction software applications, including a collaboration – or enterprise content management, ECM – solution based on OpenText.
Update (1 December 2017) – Smith is no longer CEO of Causeway; Brown is now described on the company’s website as chairman and CEO, while Smith is a non-executive director. According to Causeway’s 2016 Annual Report, Smith had joined the company in January 2017 to help drive growth.
In the US, former Viewpoint VP of global product management Bob Humphreys has joined Seattle-based Viewpoint development partner VPApps, along with Viewpoint colleagues Anthony Mavricos and Todd Weber.
