Microsoft Poaches Oracle Channel Chief

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) has poached Oracle’s (NASDAQ:ORCL) channel chief Judson Althoff (pictured) who will serve as president of sales and marketing for North America at the software giant, the company has announced. If it seems like just last week that Althoff was writing blogs for Oracle and working hard on behalf of its channel organization, well, it was. In his new job at Microsoft Althoff will manage a team of sales, marketing and services professionals across the United States and Canada. Here are the details.

Althoff brings 18 years of tech industry experience to Microsoft, the last 14 of those at Oracle. His most recent official title at Oracle was senior VP of worldwide alliances and channels and embedded sales.  At Oracle Althoff also had served as group vice president for worldwide alliances and vice president of global platform and distribution sales. Before Oracle, he held several sales leadership roles at EMC Corp.

“Judson has a track record of successfully developing, growing and leading global sales organizations with a culture of execution excellence,” said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft, in a prepared statement. “Judson’s proven leadership will enable us to continue to excel in delivering the best devices and services experience to our customers including businesses and consumers.”

Wasn’t it just a five years ago that Althoff was promoted to Oracle channel chief after his predecessor Doug Kennedy was poached by another company? Oh, wasn’t that other company also Microsoft?  I wonder what Kennedy is doing now. (MicrosoftDynamicsWorld.com reports that Kennedy’s role after a Dynamics channel reorganization has recently shifted (two weeks ago) to from VP of the Microsoft Dynamics Partner organization to VP of Dynamics Enterprise Sales and Customer Lifecycle Management.)

The Althoff moving to Microsoft news comes on the heels of reports that yet another company is looking to perhaps woo away another Oracle exec, Mark Hurd, to replace Michael Dell as CEO of Dell, depending on how the Dell-going-private deal unfolds.

Althoff will assume his new role at Microsoft on March 29, 2013, reporting to Turner, Microsoft said in a statement.