Yahoo Gets Its First CIOYahoo Gets Its First CIO

One day after Redback Networks Inc. moved to eliminate $467 million in debt by giving 95% of its common stock to bondholders, the company's former CIO was introduced as the new CIO of Yahoo Inc.

Lars Rabbe will oversee the strategic direction and execution of Yahoo's global IT infrastructure and will report to Farzad Nazem, executive VP and chief technology officer. The CIO post is a newly created one at Yahoo; the responsibilities Rabbe will inherit were previously handled by former information systems director Paul Daw, who retired a month ago.

Rabbe, a 30-year IT-industry veteran, left Redback in December, when he began serving as an executive-in-residence with Clearstone Venture Partners. During his two-year tenure at Redback, he led the company's replacement of its systems infrastructure and developed an executive dashboard that gives daily operations and business-forecasting data to senior management.

Before that, Rabbe spent more than four years at Lucent Technologies Inc., where he held CIO posts within four of the telecom vendor's divisions and converted several independent ERP systems into one that supported more than $5 billion in annual revenue.