Avaya appoints Mercer Rowe to lead new cloud business

Mercer Rowe’s responsibilities will span public, private and hybrid cloud offers.

Avaya has appointed Mercer Rowe as senior vice president and general manager for Avaya Cloud, a newly formed organisation with a focus on driving cloud products and services for the company.

Rowe joins Avaya from IBM, where he served as vice president of strategic partners for the company's cloud and Watson platforms, leading global cloud and artificial intelligence initiatives.

"Mercer brings a wealth of knowledge that will help us expand our business in the cloud, which is critical to our growth," said Jim Chirico, president and CEO, Avaya. "By creating a business solely focused on cloud products and services, and with Mercer's leadership, we will accelerate the delivery of cloud solutions that meet the growing needs of our customers and partners."

Rowe's responsibilities will span public, private and hybrid cloud offers, including cloud R&D, application development and services as well as sales for the newly organised business unit.

"Avaya is a global leader in contact centre (CC) and unified communications and collaboration (UC) software solutions with over 130,000 customers worldwide and an installed base of over 100m users," Rowe said. "The transformation of UC and CC to cloud delivery is still in the early innings and the growth opportunity for Avaya is one of the biggest cloud opportunities in the market today. I'm excited to join the new executive team at Avaya to capture the growth being driven by cloud, digital transformation, mobility, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and IoT."

Before joining IBM, Rowe founded and served as CEO of VMware vCloud Service, a joint-venture with SoftBank to deliver Cloud services in Japan. He also incubated VMware's own cloud service business, and spent a decade with cloud-powered start-ups in the enterprise software and service provider spaces, building sales, channel and services organisations. He began his career in engineering roles with Lockheed Martin and Nortel Networks.