Maria Martinez, the corporate vice president for the Communications Sector at Microsoft, will replace Rick Devenuti senior vice president of Worldwide Services come January 2007. Starting on January 5, 2007, Devenuti will step down from his current role and Martinez will transition in his place.

"Maria brings a strong track record to the services business of driving impressive results for the company," said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer of Microsoft. "I have great confidence in her leadership and the team's ability to continue our success in building our worldwide services business while successfully upholding our commitments to the partner channel."

Martinez joined Microsoft from the position of CEO at a startup software vendor in San Francisco. Prior to this position he had collaborated with Motorola, also on a vice president position. With the Redmond Company, Martinez is head of sales, marketing and development of the Communications Sector. The Communications Sector includes Microsoft's solutions and services for telecommunications, hosting, and media and entertainment companies.

"Martinez has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Puerto Rico, and a master's degree in computer engineering from Ohio State University. Following college, Martinez worked for the prestigious Bell Laboratories for 12 years, developing and patenting disk storage systems and leading development of UNIX systems for symmetric multiprocessing and high availability," added Microsoft.