Avaya has room at the top for Ceronie

It was all change at Avaya last week as the telephony vendor shook up its management team.

Avaya confirmed that it had appointed channel veteran Buddie Ceronie as vice president of channel sales EMEA, as revealed in CRN last month.

Ceronie, formerly regional sales director at 3Com for the Middle East, Norway, UK and Ireland, is joining Avaya with two more new vice presidents.

Kim Davis has left Cisco to head Avaya's service provider business, and Martyn Lambert has come from Dell to be vice president of application sales in EMEA.

Martin Wicks, Avaya's UK director of converged systems and applications, has moved on.

Ceronie will not be in charge of the day-to-day running of channels, but will oversee about four territory managers.

"Today, indirect channels provide more than half of our business," he said. "We want to build market share in the IP telephony space."

Ceronie said he would spend his first month evaluating what was in place at the company, and would not be drawn on speculation that his role might involve enticing in more data resellers.

"It's a question that has been on everyone's mind for some time," he said. "Are the resellers of the future going to come from the voice or data side? It's important to have programmes in place to cater for both sides."

Keith Humphreys, managing consultant at EuroLAN Research, said the new appointments were solid.

"Avaya's channel strategy has been confused in the past," he said. "I think Buddie will be good for sorting that out. That's why they've brought him on board."

But Humphreys said the new appointments would not have a noticeable impact on resellers immediately.

"The appointments are at such a high level we will not see any effect on the channel for at least a couple of quarters," he said.

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