No Jitter is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

New Faces in Basking Ridge

Charlie Giancarlo, interim CEO. It was just a few weeks ago when I heard Cisco's Barry O'Sullivan best-wishing Charlie as he takes Avaya's helm: "We wish him luck...but not too much." Charlie told analysts and consultants that Avaya is in advanced negotiations with a number of candidates to take over as the company's permanent chief executive. He's expecting his replacement to be in place by early 2009. It will be this person's first priority to execute on the numerous company initiatives that Avaya has been putting in place over the past twelve month, Charlie said. This should provide the company with a certain amount of continuity despite the leadership change. Once the new CEO is in place, Charlie will remain on the board of directors.

Todd Abbott, senior vice president of global sales. Todd comes to Avaya courtesy of Seagate, a technology company that, like Avaya, is owned by private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. Abbott was also a sales vice president at Cisco where he helped the company drive sales into Europe and Asia. One of his objectives at Avaya is to increase the percentage of sales that are driven by channel partners. The plan is for 85% of Avaya sales to be reseller-driven by 2011.

Michael Frendo, vice president and general manager of the Unified Communications business unit. Michael wasn't actually at the conference, but I thought I'd mention him since he just started at Avaya earlier this month. For a year he was a general manager at Juniper Networks, responsible for security products sold to large enterprises. Before that he was at Cisco for a full decade, his last post there being vice president of voice systems engineering. [Editor's note: We at VoiceCon remember Michael for the scrappy performance he turned in at the VoiceCon Great Debate in 2004, going up against reigning champ Phil Edholm of Nortel.]

Bob Lyons, vice president and GM of the contact center business unit. Until June of this year, Bob was senior vice president of Operations and Technology at Convergys, a developer of customer and employee relationship software. Chris Forment, president of Avaya Global Services, is also new to Avaya, having come over from BearingPoint in June. Much of his leadership team for Avaya's professional, managed, and support services are also new to the company. Brett Shockley, former president of Spanlink and erstwhile GM of Cisco's customer contact organization, has for the past week been in charge of Avaya's professional services division, is now in charge of Avaya's professional services organization. And Alan Baratz, formerly senior vice President of Cisco's Network Software and Systems Technology group, just started as Avaya's SVP of global communications solutions, which covers solutions in the company's Unified Communications group.

Ed Wadbrook, senior director of unified communications product management. OK, I knew about Charlie and Todd joining the Avaya team, but running into Ed this week was a complete surprise to me. He just started a few days ago. Ed was most recently Senior Director of Unified Communications at Microsoft. He was at the thick of things as the company developed and launched Office Communications Server 2007. At Avaya he will be leveraging his Microsoft experience to help his new employer take a more software-centric approach to product development and delivery.

Avaya is clearly in the midst of some major initiatives that have the potential of transforming the company. In the year since going private, Avaya reorganized its business units, reduced its workforce, switched CEOs, and is introducing some major (and rather Cisco-centric) changes to its executive- and director-level leadership. It will be interesting to see how these changes will shape where the next year takes them.