AMD, HPE Hire Away Cloud Executives from Intel, VMware 

The industry-wide hiring wars have taken their latest toll at Intel and VMware, which each recently lost an experienced cloud executive to competitors AMD and HPE.

After more than 22 years at Intel, Lynn A. Comp has joined AMD as a corporate vice president of the cloud business group in the AMD server business unit, while Fidelma Russo left VMware to become the new CTO at HPE, where she will lead the company’s technology roadmap and manage the design and development of its GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.

Lynn A. Comp of AMD

At Intel, Comp left as the vice president of that company’s data platforms group and the general manager of the visual infrastructure division. Her tenure at Intel also included roles as the senior director for industry and sales enabling in data center communications, the director of solutions and technologies product marketing and the director of strategic software planning for IoT and communications.

“Lynn will be responsible for all go-to-market activities for cloud and mega-data center customers, as well as drive our customer engineering, optimization and benchmarking functions,” AMD told EnterpriseAI in a statement. “Lynn comes to AMD with more than 20 years of experience in data center, IT infrastructure strategy and product planning, and will be a key member of the EPYC leadership team as we continue to expand our cloud business.”

Comp earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Phoenix.

Russo, the new CTO at HPE, arrived at the company from VMware, where she was a senior vice president and general manager of its cloud service business unit since May of 2020. Before joining VMware, Russo had executive roles at Iron Mountain, Dell EMC, HP and Sun Microsystems and has more than 30 years of technology experience spanning cloud services, machine learning and analytics, global IT business services, servers, storage, networking, backup and infrastructure. She also currently serves as a director of SBA Communications and sits on the Audit Committee.

Fidelma Russo of HPE

Russo earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from University College Cork, a master’s degree in computer science from Boston University and completed the internet of things executive education program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

“We are excited for Fidelma to join the HPE team in this important role,” Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE, said in a statement. “Fidelma brings deep expertise in cloud services, software, and infrastructure built on an extensive career in technology. Her diverse experience makes her distinctively suited to drive innovation as we accelerate our transformation and bring differentiated solutions to the market.”

Russo said she is excited to take on her new role.

“I am thrilled to be joining Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a company with a deep heritage of innovation that is now at another transformational moment in the industry,” she said in a statement. “I look forward to working with our leadership, engineers, developers, customers and partners as we focus on delivering solutions that provide a unified as a service experience, from edge-to-cloud.”

Hiring in the world of IT, like much of the rest of the economy, has been difficult for tech companies due to a lack of candidates for development, manager and executive roles. This often leads to job changes and poaching among companies and industries as businesses seek out the most-qualified and skilled candidates and workers look to make career moves.