IBM Replaces Top X64 Server Exec

Published: February 13, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Employees in server maker IBM's System x division, which designs and markets its line of X64-based servers (but doesn't actually manufacture them), were quietly notified last week that they have a new boss. Susan Whitney, who has been general manager of the division since 2001, is retiring, and she has been replaced by Rich Hume, a general manager within IBM's Global Services group who also has experience running IBM's portions of Big Blue's former PC business.

Whitney, who has held a number of key marketing, sales, and distribution positions during her 35-year career at IBM, ran the marketing operations for the company's AS/400 proprietary minicomputers in the 1990s, and by the end of 1998, when the former AS/400 general manager, Bill Zeitler, took over as the manager of IBM's four server units--X64, AS/400, RS/6000, and mainframe--Whitney was tapped to handle marketing for the entire server line. She was instrumental in the rebranding of those four servers lines under the eServer campaign in 2000, which coincided with Sam Palmisano taking over the company as chairman and chief executive officer. With the eServer campaign, IBM positioned itself first as a maker of servers that embraced new technologies such as Linux and downplayed the uniqueness of its various server lines. This enabled Big Blue to spend a lot of dough on marketing IBM as a cool and sometimes funny server maker without getting into any specifics--which often wrankled users and resellers of particular server lines, who want IBM to push specific products.

During Whitney's tenure, IBM has revamped its X86 and then X64 server lines, invested substantially in chipsets for high-end servers that provide the scalability other X86 and X64 products lacked, giving IBM decent revenue growth even if its volumes came nowhere near those of rival Hewlett-Packard and were still well behind those of Dell. IBM's successful BladeCenter blade server product line was launched and pitched heavily on her watch, too, and IBM became the first tier-one server maker to adopt the Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices. This undoubtedly annoyed the top brass at partner Intel, as did IBM's decision in March 2005 to not support the Itanium processor with its "Hurricane" X3 chipset.

Hume comes to the general manager position at the System x division from IBM's Global Business Solutions unit within Global Services, where he was the general manager of operations. According to his official IBM bio, Hume was responsible for "the day-to-day operational execution globally," which sounds more like the job the Grim Reaper has. In plain English, what Hume apparently did was cut $750 million in costs out of the Global Services business since he was named to that post in January 2006. Those are big numbers, even for IBM. And that explains, in part, why he has the top System x job now. IBM, like other server makers, needs to cut costs in its supply chain and sales, marketing, and distribution operations to compete and bring profits to the bottom line.

Prior to taking that job, Hume was the general manager of IBM's myriad Web sites and also managed the 4,000 telephone and Web sales people associated with the ibm.com site. Hume joined IBM in 1984 after graduating with a B.S. in accounting from Pennsylvania State University (Go Lions!), and rose through the ranks to be vice president of IBM's supply chain operations and vice president of the Americas unit of the former PC division.

Hume took over on February 1, and Whitney is sticking around on an interim basis to help out with special projects.

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