Polycom Names New Americas, Asia-Pacific Leaders

Damian Artt is now Polycom's president of the Americas. Previously, he was senior vice president of worldwide sales and services at Wind River Systems, which was sold to Intel in 2009. Artt spent eight years there and before that spent a dozen years at Cadence Design Systems.

Artt is based in Polycom's San Jose, Calif., headquarters, and his purview includes North America and the Caribbean and Latin America territories. He succeeds Polycom executive vice president of global sales Tracey Newell, who'd had the role on an interim basis since the departure of David Ruggiero in summer 2012.

[Related: Polycom CEO: Eight Out Of 10 Times, We Can Win Against Cisco ]

Meanwhile, Michael Alp is Polycom's new president of the Asia-Pacific region. He most recently was vice president of Asia-Pacific and Japan for EMC's backup and recovery systems business and earlier ran Asia- Pacific and Japan for EMC acquiree Data Domain.

Alp succeeds Hansjoerg Wagner, who recently retired from Polycom after six years in that role.

Polycom is coming off a financially lumpy 2012 -- its revenue fell 9 percent year over year in its fiscal fourth quarter -- but weathered an overall drop-off in videoconferencing spending better than Cisco, from which it took market share in 2012, and LifeSize, whose parent company, Logitech, is mulling a sale of the unit.

In October, Polycom went live with a series of new products and services, including multiprotocol MCUs and cloud offerings, that it intends to sell through the channel. CEO Andy Miller told CRN at the time that Polycom was not only stable, but also had an aggressive, long-term road map for growth.

"Late last year, Polycom announced the largest and most important product launch in our history, with solutions designed to accelerate the mass adoption of video collaboration and fuel new growth opportunities for Polycom and our partners. Damian and Michael will lead Polycom's execution of this launch in their respective theaters, helping to drive growth for the company and our partner community," Miller said in a statement accompanying the executive appointments.

PUBLISHED JAN. 28, 2013