October in the C-suite was all about wheeling and dealing

It might be the sign of underlying strength in the market, or it might be shuffling deck chairs on the AI Titanic—whatever you call it, the tech C-suite had a lot of movement across organizations in October.

AWS snags a new AI security executive

Chet Kapoor, former CEO of DataStax, moved to Amazon Web Services, where he will become VP of AI security services and observability. CEO Matt Garman made the announcement in a companywide email on Oct. 13.

Kapoor led DataStax as chairman and CEO from October 2019 to July 2025; formerly, he worked as a VP at Google for three years, spent nearly a decade as CEO of Apigee, and was a VP at IBM, among other positions.

In his email to staff, Garman framed Kapoor’s appointment as part of AWS’s adjustment to a changing security market: “As we have seen our customers’ cloud deployments get more complex over time, providing outstanding external security and observability services has become a more important part of our business, and AI is completely changing what is possible and what is needed in this area.”

Two Pennsylvania top tech execs leave their roles

October saw the departure of the state of Pennsylvania’s CIO and CTO, both resigning in the first half of the month.

Amaya Capellan’s decision to leave came just over two years after she joined the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as CIO; prior to her move to the public sector, she spent six and a half years at Comcast following two decades at various companies in technical roles.

“This week, leadership and I agreed that this was the right time for a transition,” Capellan wrote on LinkedIn. “There is still important work ahead, and I have every confidence that the new leaders of [the state’s Office of Information Technology] will continue advancing the mission.”

R. Brian Andrews, the state’s CTO, took a more subdued approach to announcing his departure, posting on LinkedIn that he was open to work. Andrews spent nearly 12 years at the Pennsylvania Office of Administration; he was CTO for one year after working his way up the ladder in the department. Prior to his work there, he spent nearly six and a half years at the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry and four years at the state DOT.

“I’m now seeking a mission-oriented leadership role—whether in the public, private, or nonprofit sector—where I can help align technology, people, and purpose to create measurable impact,” Andrews wrote.

Accenture CTO slides over to Google Cloud

Karthik Narain is Google Cloud’s new chief product and business officer. The move comes after Narain spent more than 10 and a half years at Accenture, ending as CTO. Prior to that, Narain was at HCLTech for almost a decade after five years at Infosys.

In a LinkedIn post, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said Narain “will lead product and engineering teams across cloud, developer, data and applied AI, the go-to-market organization, and work closely with Google Public Sector.”

Nancy Mounir goes to Oracle from Microsoft

After a little over nine years at Microsoft, Nancy Mounir is taking her talents to Oracle as VP of the company’s cloud infrastructure business. Mounir was most recently the senior director and chief of staff of the company’s identity and network access division.

Oracle’s cloud infrastructure platform focuses on systems migration and maintenance of security posture. In a comment posted to LinkedIn, Mounir said she was going to be working with the group’s security platform team.