Former Avaya Aura Director Joins VAR500 Power Carousel

VAR500 staple Carousel Industries said this week it had hired Ed Wadbrook, the former director of Avaya's Aura product group and a well-known unified communications executive, to a new role as vice president, applications and collaborative solutions.

"Ed will work to develop new solutions that complement and extend the UC solutions we currently build for our customers," Dan Whalen, Carousel's vice president of engineering, said in a statement. "His extended experience with communications-based solutions spans all the critical application areas, voice, video, data, collaboration and managed services. That expertise will help to drive Carousel's success in the UC space."

Wadbrook was principal and founder at UC Advisors Group in 2011, but is known in the channel for the two years he spent at Avaya, where as senior director, unified communications, he headed up product management for Avaya Aura, the company's virtualized UC platform. He was also co-lead at Avaya for the product management integration of Nortel's UC products following Avaya's acquisition of Nortel's former enterprise business unit in 2009.

[Related: 10 Keys to the Avaya-Nortel Integration ]

Before Avaya, Wadbrook spent four years at Microsoft, where he led the software giant's burgeoning UC strategy and was responsible for securing the funding to create the UC group within Microsoft's Business Division. Earlier in his career, Wadbrook held executive roles at Sonexis, 3Com, NBX and AT&T.

Exeter, R.I.-based Carousel, ranked No. 89 on CRN's 2011 VAR500 list, came up in the channel as a telephony and infrastructure integrator, but in recent years has expanded its scope to include mobility, video, managed services, security and other adjacent markets, and has grown significantly via frequent acquisition. It's also grown its executive ranks, and in December hired former SAIC executive Richard Losey to lead its services delivery organization.

Avaya has seen frequent executive turnover in the last few years, including this week's confirmation that global channel chief Jeremy Butt would exit the networking vendor at the end of March. Wadbrook is only the latest example of former vendor executives taking new positions at the VARs and integrators with whom they previously partnered. Earlier this week, Parsippany, N.J.-based VAR and Avaya power Strategic Products and Services confirmed Avaya's former U.S. services chief, Jenine Johnson, as its new vice president of services and operations.