Optus Business nicks new MD from Telstra

news Telecommunications giant Optus announced yesterday that John Paitaridis would be the new Managing Director of Optus Business, a its division providing telecommunications and information and communications technology (ICT) solutions to businesses.

Paitaridis will head the Optus enterprise, government and corporate business and is responsible for every part of the division’s sales, operations, marketing, products and service delivery, including Optus’ wholly owned subsidiary Alphawest and its Uecomm business.

Paitaridis, an accomplished senior executive, comes with 20 years’ experience in the telecommunications and IT sectors. His most recent position was Executive Director, Network Products and Services of Telstra, in the government and open space. He has spent a decade of his career working in international markets, with five years as the APAC regional director and three years as head of sales and marketing in Europe.

Highlighting Optus Business’ achievement in winning contracts with Sydney Water, NRMA and Tabcorp in the previous 12 to 18 months, Paitaridis said that this had helped the company make strong in-roads in the government and enterprise market. “Optus Business is an established whole-of-business ICT solutions provider with the capability to scale services across APAC as part of the SingTel Group, coupled with a strong customer focus,” he explained.

Paitaridis also stated that Optus Business would up the ante in the enterprise market by endeavouring to deliver the most compelling ICT solutions and develop into the service provider of choice for corporate and government customers. “Our focus remains on delivering superior customer experience and giving customers a competitive edge through differentiated products and services in areas such as cloud computing, data networking, mobility and enterprise collaboration,” Paitaridis said.

The new announcement follows a number of senior appointments to the Optus Business leadership team in 2011, strengthening the division’s market position with differentiated offerings and focus on customer experience. The recent appointments include Paul Mullins as Government Sales Director, Sam Kennedy as General Manager of Queensland and Northern Territory, as well as the promotion of Optus SMB Marketing Director Phil Offer as the Director of Mobility and Convergence.

In September 2010, the acting Managing Director of Optus Business, Rob Parcell had announced the launch of a new scalable commercial enterprise ‘cloud’ service – Optus Cloud Solutions, in collaboration with its subsidiary Alphawest. The infrastructure for the cloud, called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), is delivered through Optus’ ‘Evolve’ IP network. Optus Business has a partnership with the joint VMWare, Cisco and EMC technology platform for the cloud computing services.

Speaking about the scalable service, Parcell had said, “Optus Cloud Solutions have been designed to give customers the flexibility, agility and control to scale their IT services up and down in real time to support business requirements and fluctuations, without having to maintain their own infrastructure.” The portal allows administrators to create, manage and use virtual machines, catalogues, users and groups.

Image credit: Optus