Telecommunications equipment vendor, Alcatel-Lucent, has promoted Chris Downes to channel sales director for Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ).
Having been with the company’s partner business since 2008, he will now be in charge of leading its overall channel strategy. He officially started in the new role in February.
Downes told ARN his top priority over the next six to 12 months is transitioning Alcatel-Lucent’s key unified communications (UC) and voice partners in the hosted Cloud and UC-as-a-service (UCaaS).
“Last year we launched with UXC Connect our UCaaS solution which is called OpenTouch Enterprise Cloud,” Downes said.
“UXC has branded this as an integrated telephony-as-a-service. That is key because more and more of our customer and partner conversations contain an 'as-a-service' element to them.”
His focus will be on ensuring partners can effectively assess which customers have a real necessity for UCaaS rather than deploying for the sake of it.
Downes will also work on growing the company’s market share in the UC space as it looks to compete with the likes of networking giant, Cisco.
Prior to the promotion, Downes held the role of channel sales manager for six years. Before this he spent more than a decade with Verizon.
