In one of its more comprehensive rounds of corporate musical chairs, IBM has instituted a broad-brush cabinet reshuffle with promotion for a whole string of promising executives. The key one that has caught the eye in the US is the appointment of Bernard Puckett, who was in charge of the System/390 mainframe launch, as general manager of the 30,000-employee Application Solutions line of business, which was created by IBM to make the company much more responsive to specific customer requirements for software and services. The promotion carries with it a seat on the 20-person corporate management board. The new post is seen as a reward for achieving a smooth transition from the 3090s to the Summit generation of mainframes and avoiding the buyers’ strike that usually accompanies the several months either side of the launch of a major new generation of mainframes. Puckett succeeds Ned Lautenbach, who is appointed senior managing director, operations, for the Asia/Pacific group, reporting to Edward Lucente, who runs the group but whose tour of duty in Tokyo is expected to end this year when Lautenbach is expected to succeed. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Lautenbach has not won a completely clean report card for his running of the Application Solutions business: during his term, IBM invested more than $500m in a string of small software companies, many of which have been very indifferent performers since IBM put in its cash. Succeeding Puckett at mainframes is Nicholas Donofrio, who had been running the workstation division and got much of the credit for the successful launch of the RS/6000. Bill Filip moves up to head the workstation division where he was an assistant general manager in charge of RS/6000 marketing. Joseph Guglielmi becomes general manager, marketing and business development, of the personal computer and workstation line of business, a position seen as essentially Filip’s old job, but with some additional responsibilities. He had been president of the Application Solutions division, part of Puckett’s new fiefdom, and Anne-Lee Verville, who had been on a special assignment, succeeds him.
