Tom Rodden

Chief of Strategy, Axiarete AI

Tom Rodden has been a leader and innovator in IT and Supply Chain over his 35 year career.  

Currently Tom is serving as a full-time consultant and advisor to the IT organization at NXP Semiconductors and is the Chief of Strategy for Axiarete AI, a start-up focused on application portfolio optimization.  Tom has just recently been engaged by the private equity form, Hellman & Friedman, to organize a series of CIO Summit meetings for the IT leaders of H&F’s 31 portfolio companies.  In addition to these activities, Tom is part of the advisory boards of Onymos, an API services provider to software development teams, and CloudRek, a IT staffing platform designed to disintermediate the traditional hiring process.

Prior to these roles, Tom was CIO of Varian’s global Information Technology (IT) organization from 2017 to 2022.  Varian was a $ 3 BN revenue med device company focused on radiation therapy acquired by Siemens in 2022.  Tom’s defined the mission of IT at Varian as “boundaryless partnership” with the goal of extending the role of IT beyond the 4 walls of the enterprise, focusing on customers, acquisition integration, and leading transformation.

Before joining Varian, Tom worked for 10 years in logistics and manufacturing operations at GE and spent 10 years in consulting, first with PwC and then with Deloitte, delivering large-scale projects.  

Tom was a History and English major at LaSalle University and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study Austrian literature.  After two years abroad, Tom returned to the US and earned an MBA from the University of Virginia’s Colgate Darden School of Business.