Age: 43
Title: CIO
Salary: $200,000
Company: Avanade Inc.
Annual Revenue: $387 million
Industry: IT integration services (for Microsoft products)
Location: Seattle
Help Wanted: Avanade executives had worked closely with Christian during his 14 years in Microsoft's IT organization.
Selling Point: The ability to work in a smaller-company environment but still be surrounded by high-quality people. (Many of Avanade's employees hail from Microsoft, which was an early partner with Accenture in founding the tech integrator six years ago.)
Surprise Perk: "Although my commute is much worse and parking is harder to find, the location overlooking Puget Sound is phenomenal."
How did you get that job, anyhow?: Christian's predecessor at Avanade called Microsoft CIO Ron Markezich to make sure it was OK to pursue Christian as a candidate. "I assumed I would die at Microsoft and never thought anything would be appealing enough to get me to leave. But this was just a 1-2-3 punch of a great company mission, a smaller environment and an overlap with my talents."
This was first published in October 2006