Diana Ryall, Managing Director of Apple Computer Australia, is resigning for personal reasons. She’ll step down at the end of this month, and Ben Bowley, former marketing chief, will assume her duties.
Ryall was diagnosed with cancer a little over a year ago. Though the prognosis is good, she’s decided to put family before business, according to an Information Technology article .
“This is a 60-plus hours a week job,” she told I.T. magazine. “It’s high stress and high pressure. And I just thought, ‘Do I really believe that it is the right thing for my body to go back into a really heavy job?’ I decided I didn’t think it was.”
Ryall has 20 years’ experience with Apple, first as a part-time instructor in a Sydney training center and then, for 17 years, a full-time staff member. Her team-building skills, and the ready response she won from her staff members, resulted in Apple Australia winning the Employer of the Year award for 2000, according to I.T.
Ryall graduated in Sydney with degrees in math and statistics. After she married, she moved to the US. She went to work at Penn State University working on computer-aided instruction until she and her husband moved to Canada. Ryall returned to teaching, instructing high school students in basic computer programming. According to I.T., they later moved back to Australia, where Ryall went to work in the NSW Department of Education on the high school certificate scaling system before going to work at Apple.
Meanwhile, another Apple alumnus is going to work at Insignia Solutions, a provider of accelerated Java software solutions for information appliances. Lamar Potts has been named the company’s senior vice president of worldwide sales. Potts comes to Insignia from Be Inc. (recently bought by Palm) where he served as vice president of sales and marketing.
Before Be, Potts founded LP Resource Group, a management-consulting firm that focused on corporate development, marketing and partnering strategies. And before that, he was the vice president of Apple’s Mac OS licensing business unit.