SwitchConnect appoints new channel chief

Australian cloud telephony and SIP trunking vendor SwitchConnect has hired Paul Saba as its new channel director.

Saba was hired out of the financial services sector, last working at mortgage, commercial and asset finance aggregator FAST Group as partnership manager.

In his new role, Saba is tasked to manage SwitchConnect’s channel partners, including handling its existing partners as well as helping run campaigns to generate leads for partners.

SwitchConnect CEO Rohan Milne told CRN that hiring a non-techie to run channel management can help avoid getting bogged down in the technical parts of how products work.

“Paul comes from financial services working for one of the big banks and ran its whole brokerage business, which was basically like building channel,” Milne said.

Milne added that SwitchConnect wanted to bring in Saba’s expertise in business development, running campaigns and social media to help our technically-minded MSPs find new leads and help them grow.

In an announcement on SwitchConnect’s website, Saba said, “I look forward to managing, growing and leading our joint go-to-market activities with our channel partners as well as working closely with our vendor partners which includes Ingram Micro, Ribbon Communications, Microsoft, Poly and Yealink.”

“Within the current environment, we have been instrumental in assisting our partners and vendors help their customers to work from home utilising either our Cloud UCaaS offering or Microsoft Teams Calling solution, depending on the customers’ requirements.”