UCaaS provider Mitel added several executives to its senior leadership team, including veteran channel leader Daren Finney to the role of senior vice president of global channel sales. The appointments aim to better support Mitel’s strategic and cultural transformation in the communications and collaboration space, according to a statement released by the company.
Mitel Names Daren Finney SVP, Global Channel Sales
Finney is a 25-year veteran in the industry, with global sales and channel operations experience. His past expertise involved developing and executing organizational design for channel transformation. He will lead Mitel’s global partner organization with responsibility for strategy, program development and administration.
Most recently, Finney served as chief operating officer for worldwide channel at Citrix. Prior to that, Finney served as Citrix’s vice president, EMEA partner sales and services. While at Citrix, he led strategy and overall direction for Citrix's worldwide channel, and was responsible for managing all indirect routes to market. He has previously served in leadership positions at Symantec, Lenovo and CA Technologies.
Mitel's Other Executive Appointments
In addition, Mitel announced several other executive appointments aimed at enhancing cloud expertise, strengthening customer success efforts and advancing UCaaS service delivery as well as research and development, improving market intelligence through better industry analyst relations, according to the statement.
Carlton Geckler joined Mitel as senior vice president, global cloud operations, where he will focus on reliability, performance and architectural innovation of Mitel’s multi-tenant UCaaS cloud operations, Mitel said. Geckler has more than 20 years experience managing cloud adoption and transformation, architecting large-scale development and platform environments, and leading global technical teams at companies like HERE Technologies and Nokia.
Marina de la Torre joins Mitel as vice president, customer success to deliver communications experiences centered around customer outcomes, according to the statement. Previously, de la Torre worked for FastSpring and MINDBODY Inc. in senior-level customer success positions.
Mohammed Kasmi joins Mitel as vice president, research and development – service delivery. In his new role, Kasmi will lead the Service Delivery R&D organization, drawing on 20 years of experience in software engineering, large-scale operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS) development and leading large-scale software development, according to the statement.
Virve Virtanen joins Mitel as vice president, analyst relations and competitive intelligence. Virtanen has held analyst relations leadership roles at companies including Poly, Mapbox, Microsoft and Nokia. Virtanen will help expand Mitel's efforts to closely engage with analysts around the world about strategy, opportunities and momentum, according to the statement.
Mitel Appoints Finney as Channel Chief: Executive Commentary
Mary McDowell, CEO at Mitel, commented on the news:
“Mitel's mission is to deliver communications experiences that enable organizations to thrive in a changing world. The addition of such world-class leaders across our organization is a key part of the strategic investments Mitel is making to elevate our portfolio and position our company globally as the business communications provider of choice. I’m excited to have them onboard and I know our business, our partners and end customers will benefit from the deep expertise they bring.”
