Dive Brief:
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Tesla Motors brought on a new CIO this year, tapping industry veteran Gary Clark as its new CIO, according to media reports and changes on Clark's LinkedIn profile.
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Clark was formerly IT CTO and engineering CIO of Juniper Networks, where he facilitated that company’s transition to cloud and SaaS applications.
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Clark replaces Jay Vijayan, who left Tesla in January 2016 to launch Stealth Startup Company.
Dive Insight:
Tesla portrays itself as an innovative and disruptive company, so the fact that it went without a CIO for over a year is surprising, particularly in light of its major acquisition of Solar CIty. Just as with many other mergers and acquistions, combining companies requires system integration and auditing to redundancy and potentially wasteful spending.
After investing in a variety of IT platforms over the past year to support its upcoming launch of the Model 3, the company likely is in serious need of help integrating all that technology. Tesla is currently building a new platform to develop more cars, according to Electrotek.
Among other things, Clark is a cloud architect who execls in running public and private clouds and operating distributed organizations in a global IT setting, both of which Tesla can benefit from.
