Motorola Loses its Chief Technology Officer

Motorola's chief strategy and technology officer Rich Nottenburg has resigned. Nottenburg had been appointed as the head of strategy in 2004 by Motorola's former CEO, Ed Zander and replaced Padmasree Warrior as chief technical officer last December when Warrior left Motorola to join Cisco Systems.

In an internal email sent last Thursday, Motorola's CEO, Greg Brown said that Mr. Nottenburg is moving to the New York area "to be with his family and pursue new opportunities."

The company has been hemorrhaging senior staff as it tries to turn around the struggling handset business and prepare for the splitting of the company into two separate units.

No detailed specifics as to why Nottenburg chose to resign were provided, although the R&D division he managed has been shrunk recently from around 1,000 staff down to some 600 and was reported to be split in half when Motorola separates off its handset division.

Nottenburg served as a strategic advisor to Motorola in the first half of 2004. He then joined the company as senior vice president and chief strategy officer later that year. Prior to joining Motorola, Nottenburg was vice president and general manager of Vitesse Semiconductor after its merger with Multilink Technology Corporation in 2003.

Earlier, in 1984, Nottenburg had joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a post-doctoral member of the technical staff in the solid-state electronics research laboratory, where he co-invented what in 1988 was the world's fastest transistor.

Posted to the site on 18th May 2008