Telecoms twist for Microsoft services

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By Gavin Clarke • Get more from this author

Posted in IT Channel, 29th November 2006 13:07 GMT

Microsoft is turning to the telecoms sector for leadership of its global services operations in the wake of veteran Rick Devenuti's departure.

The company has named its communications sector vice president Maria Martinez as vice president of worldwide services, taking over from Devenuti next January.

Martinez has a 20 year background in telecoms and software and brings a distinct engineering focus to the role. She served at Motorola and Bell Labs developing and delivering emerging technologies such as CDMA and Unix for multi-processing and high availability.

Her appointment comes at an interesting time for Microsoft's 4,000 strong services group. Devenuti, who is retiring after 19 years with Microsoft, last year revealed the services group had been dabbling in outsourcing by providing managed support for desktops, email, and SharePoint servers at customer sites.

Microsoft said in a statement Martinez would continue to build worldwide services "while successfully upholding our commitments to the partner channel". ®

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