Boston's business elite has been busy this past week. Catch up on who's going where below:
Cisco Systems plan to slough off 6,000 jobs in the next year to adapt to the changing market for networking gear, according to Recode. The firm, which has a sales office in Boston, cut 4,000 jobs in the past year. Despite the layoffs, Cisco CEO John Chambers stated that the company still expects to employ 74,000 people in total at this time next year.
Bedford, Mass. robotics firm iRobot added Michelle V. Stacy to its board of directors this week. Stacy is currently the president and general manager of P&G/Gillette and the former president of Keurig. With the strategic addition of Stacy, it looks like iRobot might be strengthening its focus on consumer-facing robots. Colin Angle, chairman and chief executive officer of iRobot, said in a statement:
Her strengths in the Consumer Products industry, combining new product innovations with successful sales and marketing campaigns, are...very important as iRobot looks to build awareness of its brand and products worldwide.
Waltham’s GMZ Energy, a high temperature thermoelectric generation power solution company, announced that it has appointed Scott Rackey as its vice president of business development. Rackey’s promotion comes shortly after GMZ appointed Cheryl Diuguid as its CEO.
Framingham, Mass.-based Prelert brought on a new vice president this week to lead the company’s development. Sophie Chang will lead the anomaly detection company’s U.K.-based engineering team. Chang joins Prelert with more than 10 years of experience in the space, most recently having served as vice president of software at 1E.
“We’ve really only scratched the surface in using machine learning to extract value out of big data,” said Chang in a statement. “Traditionally, only a team of data scientists could identify the opportunities and threats hidden in massive data sets. Helping Prelert bring these capabilities to business users around the globe will be extremely rewarding.”
