While FEMA terminated dozens of employees, including its CIO and CISO, private companies spent August snapping up IT execs. You win some, you lose some.
FEMA shed 24 employees after breaches
Two dozen FEMA employees, including CIO Charles Armstrong and CISO Gregory Edwards, were fired over their failure to manage security, allegedly leading to a breach.
In an August 29 statement, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed the action was taken because the employees “brazenly neglected basic security protocols” and put Americans at risk. The press release added that the hackers were caught before any sensitive data was extracted.
“These deep state individuals were more interested in covering up their failures than in protecting the Homeland and American citizens’ personal data, so I terminated them immediately,” Noem added.
Armstrong and Edwards are both relatively recent hires at FEMA. Armstrong’s federal career began in 1983. He served as CIO for Customs and Border Protection from 2008 until 2016, when he joined the private sector as a consultant; he returned to government in this role in November 2022.
Edwards came on board at FEMA in July 2020 after spending 2014 to 2019 working as the NATO Communications and Information Agency director of infrastructure services and service operations. Prior to his role there, he spent nearly four and a half years in executive roles at the Defense Information Systems Agency, following a 26-year career with the Air Force as a communications and computer systems officer.
Two IT execs join grocer firm SpartanNash
Bag it and tag it: Michigan grocery firm SpartanNash has brought on two executives in advance of its acquisition by C&S Wholesale Grocers.
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Ed Rybicki, the company’s new SVP and CIO, comes to SpartanNash from Ontario, Canada-based Mastronardi Produce, where he most recently served as CIO. Rybick, picked to drive innovation, operational efficiency, and growth strategy, has worked for a variety of companies, including Volkswagen and Delphi, over the course of his nearly three-decade career.
Brett Hoffman, new VP and CISO, will focus on cybersecurity. His career started in 1992 and saw him spend over a decade at Spectrum Health (now Corewell Health), where he ended as director of information security. Most recently, he served as VP of enterprise security solutions and CISO at Inspire Security Solutions.
C&S plans to acquire SpartanNash by the end of the year.
Pendo gets a new forward-thinking IT exec
Software firm Pendo has a new chief development officer. Saurabh Sodani, a 25-year industry veteran, joined the company mid-August.
Sodani comes to Pendo following a nearly four-year stint at Salesloft, where he most recently was CTO. Prior to that, he was at Oracle for six and a half years. Other experiences include Yahoo, Datalogix (now Oracle Advertising), and Symantec.
In a LinkedIn post, Sodani cited Pendo’s company culture and AI preparedness as motivating factors for his move.
“The key to building indispensable AI agents lies in data and context—and Pendo already has the instrumentation in place to capture usage across SaaS, AI, and agentic applications,” Sodani wrote. “We’re now focused on turning that data into action—powering insights, automation, and agent-driven experiences that create measurable business outcomes for our customers.”