HERE Technologies has announced that Edzard Overbeek will step down as the company’s CEO. The company’s board will appoint Denise Doyle and Adeel Manzoor, the company’s chief data officer and CFO, respectively, as interim co-CEOs during the transition phase to find a new boss.
Overbeek, who has led HERE for more than seven years, has honchoed such big announcements as this year’s release of UniMap at CES.
“I am very proud of our achievements as a team. We have transformed HERE into the no. 1 and leading location platform in the world,” Overbeek said, in a statement. “We have powered the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class for its Level 3 automated driving capabilities, and we have launched a unique and industry leading location architecture through UniMap, to name a few.”
Not much is being offered why Overbeek is stepping down, with a HERE spokeperson saying it had been in the works. However, other publications are saying that the company is finding stiff competition from Google GOOG 0.00, Apple AAPL 0.00, TomTom [TOM2] and others. In a recent Automotive News article, Overbeek was quoted that he gets no guarantee that his German luxury brand shareholders will give him business.
Prior to HERE, Overbeek held senior executive positions at Cisco CSCO, including the Global Services organization with more than $12 billion in revenues and 15,000 employees. Prior to Cisco, he held leadership positions at Fujitsu and Siemens.
