Maynard Webb Joins Salesforce.com Board

Plus: New CIOs at Qwest Communications, O’Charley’s and more

Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff welcomed Maynard Webb (pictured at left) to his board of directors yesterday.  Webb, 50, retired from eBay last month after a seven-year tenure with the company.  During that time he served as the online auction house’s CIO, president of eBay Technologies and COO.  Webb also serves on Hyperion’s board of directors.

Qwest Communications hired Girish Varma as its new CIO.  Varma replaces Balan Nair, who left Qwest in June to join AOL as its CIO and EVP of technology ops.  Varma starts his new job on September 25 and will report to Barry Allen, Qwest’s EVP of operations.  Varma currently works for IBM as its vice president of global applications services and its telecom competency center. Previously, he was CIO of AT&T.

Restaurant company O’Charley’s Inc. invited Leon De Wet to sit at its table.  De Wet, 44, will serve O’Charley’s as its new CIO.  He succeeds Jim Gray, who is retiring from the CIO post, and reports to O’Charley’s CFO Larry Hyatt.  De Wet comes to the Nashville, Tenn.-based operator and franchisor of the O’Charley’s, Ninety-Nine, and Stoney River Legendary Steaks restaurants from Brinker International, which runs Chili’s Bar and Grill, Romano’s Macaroni Grill, Maggiano’s Little Italy and On the Border. At Brinker, De Wet was responsible for information systems strategy, business intelligence applications, and technology innovation as its vice president of business intelligence and strategic systems.

Joseph Kava joined RagingWire Enteprise Solutions as its vice president of operations. He comes to the Sacramento, Calif.-based IT outsourcing provider from Applied Materials, where as the semiconductor manufacturer’s managing director of global IT operations and corporate e-business solutions, he saved more than $20 million in operating costs each year, according to RagingWire’s press release announcing Kava’s hire. 

Newsday has an article on the brain drain taking place at Computer Associates. Among the executives who’ve left—voluntarily or not—is CA’s CIO Kevin Kern.