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New year, new faces. Here’s who rotated in and out of the IT C-suite in January.
Adam Ford leaves Illinois CISO position
After working for the state of Illinois’s tech department since 2000, CISO Adam Ford departed for cloud security company Zscaler. He announced the change in a post on LinkedIn.
Ford served as CISO for six years and four months, previously working for the state as a network security manager and network engineer. He worked concurrently in the Illinois State Police tech department, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Tampa CIO-CTO retires
Tampa’s CIO and CTO, Russell Haupert, retired in January. Haupert spent more than 12 years in the position after working as director of IT services for the Peoria, Illinois, county government.
“One thing led to another and eight years later I was the director there,” Haupert told state and local government news outlet StateScoop.
On LinkedIn, Haupert lists his current job—which he started in January—as an industry executive, state and local government, for cloud technology company Oracle.
Slack CTO Cal Henderson is out
Two and a half years after Salesforce acquired Slack, one of the last founding members of the work messaging company is out. Cal Henderson stepped down as Slack CTO in mid January. He’ll stay in his position until March 1, but his resignation took effect immediately, UC Today reported.
“I think there’s an average amount of time that founders stay after an acquisition, and this is way longer than that,” a Salesforce representative told UC Today. “This was not a surprise. This was something that’s been talked about for quite some time.”
Salesforce co-founder and CTO Parker Harris will take over for Henderson as Slack CTO.
Purdue University hires Justin Greer as CISO
Indiana’s Purdue University has officially hired interim CISO Justin Greer to the position full time. A Purdue graduate, Greer has been with the university for 15 years.
Greer beat out what the school called a “national search” for the position. Purdue CIO Ian Hyatt said in a statement that Greer “seamlessly stepped into the Interim CISO role and embraced the opportunity to lead Purdue’s security efforts with a bias for action.”
“Cybersecurity remains a top-level priority for Purdue IT, and I am confident that he is the right person to lead these efforts,” Hyatt said.