Looks Like PureFlex GM Has Left Big Blue

July 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We live in a modern social world, and sometimes you find more things out about executives at IT suppliers through sites like LinkedIn than you do through proper press relations channels. And so it is with Andy Monshaw, who was general manager of IBM‘s PureSystems modular systems until last week it looks like.

Monshaw, who has been in the IT business for 28 years based on his biography on the PureSystems sub-site on the IBM web site, has had his official biography taken off the IBM executive bios section. And he has updated his LinkedIn account as thus:

Those are pretty good indications that Monshaw has left IBM. I tried to confirm this with IBM’s public relations people on Friday, but no one was available because of the quasi-holiday in the United States after the July 4th national holiday.

Monshaw took over as general manager of the PureSystems business prior to its launch in April 2012, and before that he was familiar to readers of The Four Hundred as the executive in charge of the company’s cross-divisional global mid-market organization, and he spent many years running Big Blue’s storage business before that as well as a number of positions in the Systems and Technology Group organization.

It is unclear why Monshaw has departed from IBM, and it is irresponsible to speculate too much. But, suffice it to say that many seasoned execs have a desire to run a company of their own after a while and at the same time there is a lot of pressure on IBM’s executives in the software and systems businesses to turn in better numbers than is perhaps reasonable given the state of the global economy and the systems business that reflects that economy as well as the current state of various processing, storage, and networking technologies. What can also be said is that such a seasoned exec is not an easy thing for any company to lose, and odds are that he will pop up somewhere else very soon.