Coyne becomes an Xpert boss
Former 3Com bigwig becomes Xpert Group's chief commercial officer
Former 3Com UK managing director Rob Coyne has joined the board of Xpert Group as chief commercial officer.
As exclusively revealed in CRN last month, Coyne will oversee Xpert Communications, the business formed by joining Xpert Systems, a data networking VAR, and contact centre specialist Genesis, which Xpert Group acquired two years ago.
Coyne left the networking vendor after less than a year at the helm.
"The reason I left 3Com was for the Xpert opportunity. I was in discussion with Xpert for some time," he said. "We have pretty aggressive plans. We are going to stick to doing a few things very well with key partners such as BT, Cisco, Avaya, Hewlett-Packard and Mitel."
Coyne will join chief executive Martin Balaam and group financial director Mo Ramzanon on the Xpert Group board.
Balaam said last month that Xpert would concentrate on its reseller businesses and wind down Caltell, its distribution business.
Coyne said Xpert Communications will concentrate on mobility, security, convergence and contact centres. "We will be going for very aggressive organic growth and concentrating on the academic, public and healthcare sectors," he said.
Xpert is not alone in looking to build reseller businesses with both voice and data networking skills through acquisitions.
Matrix recently bought Extreme Networks specialist Bedrock and voice and data distributor Norwood Adam. Azzurri has bought a total of 11 companies, and 2e2 recently bought convergence reseller Prime Solutions.
However, Keith Humphreys, managing consultant at EuroLAN, sounded a note of caution.
"If you look at Damovo, NexteiraOne, Omnetica and the like, the jury is still out on this first wave of voice and data resellers. Omnetica is the only one that appears to be surviving the beauty contest at the moment," he said.