Warhurst becomes Aastra's new A/NZ managing director

Former Aastra A/NZ director of sales and marketing, Tony Warhurst, has been promoted to the role of A/NZ managing director.

He replaces John Ward, who held the position until May 2011.

Since leaving the role at Aastra, Ward has served at Cisco as its Asia-Pacific and China services financial services industry head and is currently holding the role of Asia-Pacific and China service Cloud regional director at Salesforce.com.

“At that time, I got promoted to director of sales and marketing. Aastra divided the country sales unit into sales and marketing and finance and operations. A director was appointed in Melbourne to also do the operations and finance till today,” Warhurst said.

Warhurst got the role when Aastra CEO, Tony Shen, approached him at the recent Aastra partner conference in Vietnam to be the single point in control of the A/NZ region.

According to Warhurst, one of the reasons he was appointed to the role was the changes that he has been implementing with the company’s go-to-market strategies and an increased focus to forge stronger relations with its resellers in the past 12 to 18 months.

“We are going to continue down that path in focusing on the channel,” he said.

In the coming months, Warhurst will look to invest in setting up and launching a new channel rewards program for deals and systems that the resellers are selling for Aastra. Resellers will be able to claim the rewards points against prizes that Aastra will make available on its website.

The company, along with Shen, will meet with reseller partners that were unable to attend the Aastra conference.

It will also announce the launch of a new product, the Bluestar high-definition video terminals. “The rewards program and the Bluestar launch will go in parallel as my first point of focus. We’ve been working on those leading up to the go-to-market strategy changes,” Warhurst said.

Prior to the role as Aastra A/NZ director of sales and marketing, Warhurst served as its A/NZ channel manager. He has also formerly worked in ShoreTel, Zultys and Pihana.

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