People On the Move - May 21, 2021 Update

WECS Renewables (Palm Springs, CA): Bruce Hammett, chairman and founder, has completed a transaction to take on a partner, Theresa Eaton, to facilitate a new stage of growth and expansion for the business (photo above). Eaton has been appointed CEO, and Bruce Hammett will remain in a leadership role as chairman of the company and will be a continued significant owner in the business. No other changes in management have taken place.

Eaton said in the press release, “Bruce is a pioneer in the wind and solar industry, having started out in the wind sector as an engineer more than 40 years ago. I am thrilled to be joining the fantastic company that Bruce and his team at WECS have built and grown since 1989. WECS is one of the leading providers of engineered solutions and component parts to the renewables industry, and I am honored to become their partner.”

Hammett said in the release, “We are excited to have Theresa Eaton join the WECS team with a vision for growth for the future. WECS and its group of terrific employees look forward to even further expansion of the company’s capabilities under Theresa’s leadership in the coming months and years, for the continued success of WECS’s customers.”

Acuity Brands (Atlanta): Peter Han, co-founder of Rockpile Ventures, is now president of Acuity’s newly-named Intelligent Spaces Group (ISG). Formerly referred to as Acuity’s Intelligent Buildings business, ISG includes Atrius and Distech Controls. Rockpile co-founder Dinesh Narayanan is now VP of business development of ISG. The addition of these leaders and the acquisition of Rockpile Ventures, a Seattle-based accelerator of early-stage artificial intelligence (AI) companies, better position Acuity for growth in solutions, software and cloud application development. Acuity now holds Rockpile’s equity interests in AI startups. Rockpile’s portfolio technologies have been deployed at leading enterprises across the energy, manufacturing, and retail verticals.

“We see great opportunities at Acuity to combine our existing footprint of sensors and back-office infrastructure with new AI models in the cloud,” said Han in the press release. “We are building systems to sense, think and act at scale and to use Acuity’s reach and capability to deploy those systems to make spaces smarter, safer and greener.”

Han will lead ISG teams based in Atlanta, Montreal, San Francisco and Seattle. Before founding Rockpile, he worked as chief marketing officer of Supermicro, a $3.5-billion revenue server manufacturer in the San Francisco Bay area. He also spent 15 years at Microsoft managing teams that shipped hundreds of millions of Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) devices annually, including desktops, notebooks, servers and commercial IoT devices infused with software solutions.

Narayanan was formerly head of Microsoft’s devices incubation group, where he partnered with Azure and AI engineering, marketing and business-development teams to build out edge solutions. He worked with cross-functional groups creating the markets for autonomous systems and ambient sensors.

Allied Wire and Cable (Collegeville, PA): Glenn Liacouras joined the company as chief commercial officer and will oversee sales and marketing. Liacouras grew up in West Chester, PA, attended the University of North Carolina on a baseball scholarship and received a BA in business there. He worked as a salesperson in the specialty chemical industry in the Philadelphia area for 12 years.

He also earned an MBA from St. Joseph’s University and started his own successful international motorcycle transportation company. After selling that company to VWR International (now Avantor), a global distributor of laboratory supplies, he held an executive post at Miele, a German manufacturer of premium appliances and state-of-the-art industrial-grade products.

MDU Resources Group (Bismarck, ND): Dale Rosenthal was elected as a new independent director to the company's board. Rosenthal, 64, has experience in the construction industry, having held senior executive positions including strategic director, division president and chief financial officer in an integrated construction company. She held various positions for 22 years with Clark Construction Group,, a vertically integrated construction company. Rosenthal also has served since 2014 as a director of Washington Gas Light Co., a regulated public utility company that is now a subsidiary of AltaGas Ltd and sells and supplies natural gas in Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas.