Nortel's breakup no doom for 3D Networks

Contact centre integrator, 3D Networks, has appointed Rod Taylor, as its chief executive officer for Australia and New Zealand.

Taylor told CRN he will ensure he and his staff engage with customers in a consultative and value-added manner. 

"The way we engage with the customer is my primary focus at 3D Networks.  The fundamental change we are going to make is that we become a purveyor of network solutions that fit a particular customer need," he said.

"I want to make sure we get this right so that we become an agnostic, trusted advisor to our customers. 

"We will still have strategic alignment to those people that manufacture those solutions such as Nortel, Cisco, Juniper, Mitel and Microsoft."

As a Nortel partner, Taylor believes the direction the vendor is taking will ultimately result in a clearer and more defined path for existing and future customers.

"Our company [is working] with our customers in Australia to ensure the changes within Nortel and the transition towards a possible Avaya acquisition are seamless," he said.

"Nortel will certainly recover and continue to provide on-going support for what is an extensive customer base for 3D.

"In Australia 3D has restructured to provide the necessary directional advice that our customers will need moving forward."

Taylor said the impact of Nortel's breakup will depend entirely on who is the successful buyer of the vendor.

"We will only find out in September when the details are released," he said.

"If Avaya is successful it will be interesting to see how this will affect the UC market but we, 3D Networks have our strategy in place for our clients."

Taylor comes to 3D Networks from Agilent Technologies where he ran Asia-Pacific operations for the past two years.

He has around 25 years of experience building sales and business support teams throughout Asia and has a proven track record delivering results and above target performance. 

His specialties were gained also through his various roles at Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Logical Networks, Macquarie Telecom and EMC.

Meanwhile, Eduardo Piriz has also been hired as national sales director for A/NZ.

He will report directly to Taylor at 3D Networks and has been tasked with building a national sales team that meets its customer's end-to-end network requirements.

Piriz comes to 3D Networks from NCR where he spent the last 12 months with the specific responsibility of building and fostering NCRs relationship with Cisco. 

Additionally, 3D Networks has aappointed Kathryn Power as the company's strategic solutions partner manager. 

Power will be in charge of developing and nurturing relationships with key vendors including Nortel, Cisco, Juniper, Microsoft and Mitel. 

Power comes to 3D Networks from Unisys Australia where she managed the partner relationship with EMC for five years across the Asia-Pacific region.

In addition, Andrew Park has been appointed as national professional services director at 3D Networks reporting directly to Taylor. 

In this role, Park will lead the business solutions consulting division focusing on application consulting, unified communications, and data and security consulting services. 

Park comes to 3D Networks from Software AG Australia where he was the professional services director for over three years and managed across the Asia-Pacific and Japan region.