Fashion ecommerce retailer M and M Direct has named Fenton Farthing as its new CIO, replacing Graham Benson, who has taken on a new CIO role. Online and catalogue retailer M and M Direct was founded in 1987 as a retailer of end-of–line clearance business and is based in Leonminster, Herefordshire. M and M Direct claim to have over a million active customers and that their website receives 21 million visits per-year. Officially Farthing joined M and M in September 2014 following a recent career in Spain’s online gaming industry. Farthing told CIO UK that he has spent the majority of his career in retail eCommerce, starting off with developing the first transactional website for high street fashion brand Next before moving to the Shop Direct Group. During Farthing’s career with Shop Direct Group, which owns the Littlewoods department store chain he worked on Oracle Commerce and the implementation of the eCommerce platform from physical data centres on to Amazon Web Services. Farthing describes himself as “a huge advocate of agile development, continuous delivery and cloud technologies and a firm believer that, in today’s digital world, IT is no longer a support function; collaboration between all departments is vital and technology, if used correctly, is a real differentiator”. He said: “I’m really excited to have joined M and M. It is a great company with great people and great potential. I see it as my role to help realise that potential through creating a culture of cross-department collaboration, driving the rapid, continual delivery of high quality solutions that meet ever-changing business needs.” Graham Bensonhas taken a new role CIO of car rental aggregator, rentalcars.com. Related content opinion Website spoofing: risks, threats, and mitigation strategies for CIOs In this article, we take a look at how CIOs can tackle website spoofing attacks and the best ways to prevent them. By Yash Mehta Dec 01, 2023 5 mins CIO Cyberattacks Security brandpost Sponsored by Catchpoint Systems Inc. Gain full visibility across the Internet Stack with IPM (Internet Performance Monitoring) Today’s IT systems have more points of failure than ever before. Internet Performance Monitoring provides visibility over external networks and services to mitigate outages. By Neal Weinberg Dec 01, 2023 3 mins IT Operations brandpost Sponsored by Zscaler How customers can save money during periods of economic uncertainty Now is the time to overcome the challenges of perimeter-based architectures and reduce costs with zero trust. By Zscaler Dec 01, 2023 4 mins Security feature LexisNexis rises to the generative AI challenge With generative AI, the legal information services giant faces its most formidable disruptor yet. That’s why CTO Jeff Reihl is embracing and enhancing the technology swiftly to keep in front of the competition. By Paula Rooney Dec 01, 2023 6 mins Generative AI Digital Transformation Cloud Computing Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe