Pivot3, maker of storage and compute appliances, has appointed Rich Bravman as its new chief executive, effective immediately. Braveman is replacing Robert Fernander, who was Pivot3’s CEO since 2007 and will continue to play a role in the company’s business development.

Braveman has been serving in executive positions within the IT industry for three decades. He joins Pivot3 from endpoint systems maker NCR Corp, where he was in charge of a big portion of the firm’s outbound strategy.

“Rich is a proven leader with an impressive track record in taking start-ups to global publicly-traded technology leaders. Having grown through the ranks from software engineer to CEO, and having been associated with technologies that are a mix of both hardware and software makes Rich a perfect fit for Pivot3,” said Ron Nash, Chairman of the Board of Pivot3.

That experience comes from a 26-year tenure at Symbol Technologies, where he was eventually promoted to CEO and, following an organization-wide overhaul, signed a deal to sell the company to phonemaker Motorola in 2007.

The appointment of Pivot3’s new chief is the one of the latest executive-level change in the cloud industry. Earlier this week we mentioned that Permabit promoted Director of Engineering and Chief Architect Michael Fortson to VP of Engineering.  Fortson has been with the company for a long time and worked on the development of the early Albireo, Permabit’s benchmark-setting dedupe software that currently dominants the market in terms of performance.

While Pivot3 added an exec, Hewlett-Packard has lot one.  New CEO Meg Whiteman is reversing some of the more drastic plans former head Leo Apotheker left behind, namely the spinoff of the electronics’ giant consumer business. Surprisingly enough, it was Phil McKinney, vice president and chief technology officer of HP’s Personal Systems Group that decided to leave the company in light of these decisions.