IBM is transferring Al Zollar, general manager of its Lotus division for the past three years, to head its iSeries server group, it announced Thursday.
Lotus will now be headed by Ambuj Goyal, currently general manager of solutions and strategy for the software group, said Mary Rose Greenough, manager of Lotus Software communications on Thursday.
No date has yet been set for the move, Greenough said.
No reason has been given for the move, other than that it is IBM practice to regularly move executives to new positions. Zollar has spent three years at Lotus, "doing a lot of work on integrating Lotus with IBM, and I think he'll have a lot to add on the hardware side too," Greenough said.
Zollar took over at Lotus for Jeffrey Papows and held the positions of chief executive officer and president of what then was Lotus Development Corp. Soon after Zollar took the helm, though, speculation started that IBM was going to fully absorb Lotus, which it had acquired in 1995 and allowed largely to run on its own. Eventually, Zollar's title was changed to general manager and IBM officially, if quietly, announced that Lotus was being run as a software division of IBM.