Starbucks Appoints New Chief Technology Officer From Adobe

Gerri Martin-Flickinger, a veteran of Adobe, VeriSign and McAfee Associates, among other corporations, is abandoning the tech sector and joining Starbucks, the coffee titan.

Ms. Martin-Flickinger, who was most recently at Adobe where she was chief information officer, is set to be the first chief technology officer in Starbucks’s executive suite, in a testament to the role that technology is playing in the company’s plans. She is replacing Curt Garner, the company’s chief information officer, who will probably leave in November, Starbucks said.

“You will note that I have given her the title of C.T.O. versus the C.I.O. title of the past,” Kevin Johnson, the chief operating officer of Starbucks, wrote in an email sent to employees. “This is a reflection of the fact that I am looking for Gerri to not only be a great leader of our global IT function but also to contribute her expertise to help shape the global strategy and technical architecture that we are building to power Starbucks into the future.”

Mr. Johnson himself is a technology industry veteran, having served as chief executive of Juniper Networks from 2008 to 2013 and previously working for Microsoft.

Mr. Johnson has presided over the recent introduction of what Starbucks calls “Mobile Order and Pay” across the country and in Britain, which enables customers to take care of their orders and payments before they ever hit a store. Based on tests of the new system, Wall Street has applauded the enhancement of the already popular Starbucks app, which is responsible in part for a more than 50 percent jump in the company’s stock so far this year.

Starbucks has moved far more quickly to test and adopt new technology than most restaurants. Early on, it invested in Square, the mobile payments system developed by Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey. It also has installed Clover coffee machines, which combine elements of the French press and vacuum coffee brewing systems to make individual cups of brewed coffee, in some 1,600 stores so far.