Paramount Skydance’s tech chief is stepping down as David Ellison’s digital transformation heats up.
Phil Wiser, Paramount’s chief tech officer, told his colleagues on Friday morning that he’s leaving at the end of May after seven years with the company.
“Writing this and sharing this news is harder than I expected,” Wiser said in his farewell memo, which was obtained by Business Insider.
Wiser said in his memo that he wasn’t retiring. A person familiar with the move said Wiser instead may look to work with tech startups. This person said Wiser’s decision to step down on May 29 was part of a planned transition.
“Phil has played a meaningful role in shaping our technology strategy during his time here,” said Dane Glasgow, Paramount’s chief product officer, in a follow-up email to staffers.
Glasgow credited Wiser for “advancing our technical and digital capabilities, all while helping to strengthen the technology foundations as we scaled our global direct-to-consumer business.”
Instead of hiring a new chief tech officer, Glasgow told employees that Wiser’s responsibilities will be divided among four executives who will report to him:
- Laksh Nathan, EVP and chief information officer
- Jim Harrison, EVP of infrastructure & media technology
- Frank Governale, SVP of production technology & operations
- Carlo Joseph, chief information security officer
Wiser joined the company in September 2018 after serving as the tech chief for Hearst and Sony. He saw plenty of change during his tenure, including the Viacom-CBS merger, a rebrand to Paramount, and the Paramount-Skydance tie-up — plus the COVID-19 pandemic.
“His leadership has further contributed to the modernization of our platforms and the integration of data and technology across our brands,” Glasgow said in his memo.
In his final missive to Paramount staffers, Wiser said that what he was “most grateful for is not the accomplishments — as remarkable as they are.”
“It is the people,” Wiser said. “The culture of this team. The way you solve hard problems together. The way you hold each other up through wave after wave of change and uncertainty. The way you have consistently shown what is possible when talented, good people commit to something. That is what I will carry with me.”
Read Wiser’s full memo to employees here:
- The late nights and the early mornings. For the problems you solved that no one ever saw, and the ones you fixed that kept the whole thing running and got none of the credit.
- Being relentlessly focused on the complete technology and service experience for our internal and external customers.
- Every integration meeting, every migration, every system failure at 2 a.m. that somehow you turned around by dawn.
- Not flinching when COVID hit — keeping our people safe and our voice on the air.
- Protecting the company diligently while building modern, AI-first cybersecurity capabilities.
- Doing whatever was needed to get that show on the air, that production asset delivered, or that promo to pop.
- Streaming all of those live events at record-breaking scale, starting with the Super Bowl in 2019, on infrastructure that was a fraction of what exists today.
- Rebuilding our entire media supply chain, ad tech ecosystem, licensing solutions, and more into genuinely best-in-class technology and operations platforms.
- Embracing the AI opportunity early and bringing others along to advance our capabilities.
- Giving us one final win together — Oracle Fusion in just 15 months, a feat almost no organization at our scale has pulled off.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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