Two highly placed sources have told CDN that Ross Pellizzari, who is currently, GM and senior VP at Mastek Canada Ltd., will be appointed the new president of Avaya Canada.
The 25 year veteran of the IT channel in Canada spent nine years at Cisco Canada lastly as vice-president of channel operations or channel chief. He left the subsidiary 22 months ago. Nitin Kawale, the president of Cisco Canada, said at the time that Pellizzari made many contributions to Cisco Canada including the development and refining of its channel operations.
One source close to the situation told CDN that Pellizzari intends to shake things up at Avaya Canada.
Pellizzari became one of CDN’s Top Newsmakers in 2007, when he presided over a period of strong channel growth for Cisco in Canada, and pushed for greater investment by the vendor in its channel partners.
Ken Presti, a long-time Cisco follower and president of Presti Research & Consulting in Sunnyvale, Calif., says Pellizzari is a nice guy that was instrumental in both representing the channel partners from Canada to Cisco, as well as helping to shape the development of Cisco’s channel programs and policies.
“It was important to the Cisco channel to have somebody that had that kind of credibility within Cisco to represent them to upper management, and I think Ross did a great job of that,” said Presti.
Pellizzari will replace Gerard Baglieri who became the new head of Avaya Canada, replacing the long time president Mario Belanger. Baglieri however did not have the president’s title. He was managing director for Canada in keeping with the company’s policy of calling country heads of all Avaya branches outside the U.S. as managing director.
What may have triggered this change in leadership at Avaya Canada is the recent appointment of John DiLullo as vice president, Americas International sales theater, which includes Canada. DiLullo was the vice president, worldwide distribution at Cisco Systems.
CDN has reached out to Pellizzari and will be updating this story.