Boston's business elite has been busy this past week. Catch up on who's going where below:
Fort Point startup foundry Blade added Julia Austin as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Austin previously worked as vice president of innovation at Cambridge’s VMware, and as an early engineering executive at Akamai. Blade, which has a fund of $20 million to invest, opened shop in May, and has yet to announce its participating foursome of startups.
Continuous security monitoring in the cloud startup Threat Stack welcomed three new executives to its team on Thursday. Joining the company are Sam Bisbee (formerly of Cloudant and Bocoup), Chris Gervais (formerly of LifeImage and Enservio) and Pete Cheslock (formerly of Dyn and Sonian). Read more on the news here.
Waltham, Mass.-based PeopleFluent announced this week that it had appointed Rajan Venkitachalam as its vice president of product management. Prior to joining the human capital management tech firm, the new executive held leadership positions at Caradigm, ServiceNow and Microsoft.
Actifio, the data virtualization company valued around $1 billion, brought on a trio of executives in the past week. Ratan Tipirneni will serve as vice president of global customer success from Cisco. Rick Wojcik, who joined Actifio in 2012 after working at IBM, will now lead Actifio’s rapidly expanding Cloud Service Provider business-unit. Lastly, M.J. Golibart will lead what the company is calling a Mid-Atlantic “Super Region,” grow Actifio’s Federal business, and manage the company’s established teams in the Southeast and Central Regions.
Microsoft will slash 18,000 employees – or 14 percent of its staff – over the next year. The company’s hardware head Stephen Elop intimated that more than two-thirds of the planned 12,500 layoffs will occur in its hardware department, coming from overlaps within the Nokia unit.
Given that Microsoft tacked another 25,000 employees on payroll in the wake of its $7 billion acquisition of Nokia’s Devices and Services division in April, that adds up. Microsoft and Nokia have teams in Cambridge. At this point in time, it doesn’t look like the cuts will be touching the local offices. The biggest layoffs will take place in Redmond, Washington, and engineering work will be reduced in Beijing, San Diego, Oulu and Finland, according to Reuters.
Acton, Mass.-based Brainloop hired its first-ever vice president of SAP products in Dorothee Andermann. In her new role, Andermann will be responsible for building and managing Brainloop’s SAP solution suite, from product development to end delivery.
Cambridge database startup NuoDB is prepping for a major hiring push for the second half of the year. NuoDB stated that it expects its technical headcount to increase by "more than 50 percent" in 2014. The company is already on track to outgrow its current office space near Kendall Square.
AT&T plans to hire 60 new people before the close of 2014 – and that’s in addition to the 100 they’ve already hired in the last six months. Seems like Boston’s best wireless carrier continues to grow.
