Editors note: When CDN announced its annual Top 25 Newsmakers Ross Pellizzari was still with Avaya Canada. He has since left the networking and collaboration vendor.
Avaya Canada President Ross Pellizzari always wanted a segmentation approach to the Canadian market. Well, in 2014 he got his wish.
Ross Pellizzari
“Since I started at Avaya Canada I wanted to adopt a segmentation model to get more granular. These moves are more of a tune-up in terms of our go-to-market with segmentation. I now have the cavalry in place,” Pellizzari said in a previous interview.
The cavalry brought about many changes to Avaya’s Canadian team, the biggest of which saw Renzo DiPasquale leave the channel to run the enterprise business. Replacing him was Miles Davis.
But maybe the boldest part of this strategy was when he put a stop to service providers, namely Bell, Telus and Allstream dictating terms and conditions of deals. Pellizzari described the changes this way: “If a service provider does not want to use Avaya technology for let’s say a cloud solution then it’s opened up to the entire channel. If a Telco does not want an Avaya solution for a particular segment of the market; the channel partners can go in and sell there too with the help of distribution.”