Nortel Appoints New Global Sales Vice-President

Nortel has announced the appointment of William "Bill" Nelson as executive vice-president, Global Sales, effective from later this month. Nelson, 52, is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts with a Bachelor of Science degree and will be based in Nortel's offices in Billerica, Massachusetts.

"Today, we further sharpen our focus on our customers by appointing a global sales leader for Nortel. In Bill Nelson, we have an executive with a track record of building businesses, delivering value to customers and leading organizational change. He understands the important connection between hardware, software and applications in today's business models. Most of all, Bill knows how to compete and win in a market where IT and telecom are converging faster than ever before," said Zafirovski. "We have strengthened our operational effectiveness, re-vectored our R&D spend and are building a portfolio of technology innovation second to none. Bill will enhance our revenue development capabilities, manage our global customer relationships in a more integrated fashion and accelerate our go-to-market strategies."

Nelson joined EMC in 2001, with global responsibility for developing and managing EMC's go-to-market model for telecommunications, media and entertainment market coverage, as well as building an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) business for EMC's storage and storage management platforms with telecommunications infrastructure suppliers.

Previously, Nelson served for 16 years at AT&T and Lucent in various executive positions, including president of Lucent's Service Provider Operations Group (revenues in excess of $20 billion) with responsibility for sales, support, and customer service to global carriers; global sales and product management leadership for Lucent's Enterprise Communications Systems Group (later spun out as Avaya); and general manager for the Wireless Networks Group.

Posted to the site on 8th January 2008