Last year, Tesla's Chief Information Officer Jay Vijayan quietly left the company and his position has stayed mostly vacant up until now. Gary Clark, who was the IT CTO and Engineering CIO at Juniper, has quit his job and joined Tesla over the last month to take over and man the automaker's IT department.
Tesla's IT Personnel Leaving One-by-One
According to Electrek, several of Tesla's top IT executives and managers also left last year. After Vijayan, who was hugely credited for creating Tesla's ERP system, called Warp, left in January, and afterward, Guru Sankararaman, Vice-President of IT Infrastructure and Operations, also followed suit in departing the company. As of now, they have co-founded a startup in stealth mode on their respective LinkedIn profiles.
Other Notable Departures
Ganesh V. Iyer, who also came to Tesla from VMware, took over as acting CIO, but he only lasted a few months since he left in May to join electric vehicle startup NIO as the company's CIO and Head of Global Digital Operations. Those recent departures have gutted and hindered Tesla's IT leadership and therefore, Clark's arrival should be welcomed.
About Gary Clark
Clark came from Juniper Networks. Before joining the networking security company back in 2011, Clark had a long career at the logistics company DHL, where he held several leadership positions in the IT department dating back from 1994 to 2007.
What Clark Can Contribute
His wide range background in the logistics business should prove very useful at Tesla, where the company is aiming for the IT department to create and develop tools to manage the entire business from engineering to service.
According to CNBC, the system has reportedly also been developed and used by CEO Elon Musk's other company, SpaceX. Recently, there has been more collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX than just sharing a CEO. Several other top employees have held dual roles at both companies, like the time when Musk hired Apple's alloy expert to lead materials engineering at both Tesla and SpaceX.
