Ciena names new chief for Australia, NZ

Global telecommunications equipment firm Ciena has announced the appointment of Matt Vesperman as managing director for Australia and New Zealand, as the company looks to drive the shift to on-demand networks in the region.

As MD, Vesperman is tasked with guiding Ciena's customers and partners in the region as they adapt to accommodate high-bandwidth applications and services, such as those needed for data center interconnect (DCI), cloud-based services and the Internet of Things.

According to Anthony McLachlan, vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific at Ciena, growth in cloud computing, network virtualisation and openness have created a new web-scale dynamic that is changing today's network architectures.

He says Vesperman will drive Ciena's OPn network approach in the region to facilitate the transformation towards open, software-driven networks to meet this growth.

"Matt is a proven industry veteran with an engineering background and business sense that makes him the perfect fit to continue to drive our business in Australia and New Zealand," McLachlan says.

"He has been at the forefront of innovation in this space for more than two decades, and his knowledge of the ongoing evolution of networks – from pipes that connected two locations into cloud-based, software defined architectures – makes him ideally suited to help service providers in the region transform capacity into capability," he explains.

"The Internet of Things era is here, and service providers across the country are looking at ways to cater for this explosion in data that only promises to increase with the further proliferation of IoT devices," says Vesperman.

"Our customers and prospective customers in Australia and New Zealand want to know how their networks can be architected into fully programmable infrastructures to meet the seamless experience demands of their customers," he says.

Vesperman has more than 25 years of experience across a variety of disciplines within the IT-T industry, including working for more than 10 years with Nortel and previously with Ciena in 2010. Before re-joining Ciena, Vesperman held numerous roles in the region including most recently as a senior account director at Ericsson and as VP of sales at Openwave Mobility. He has also previously worked in engineering roles at Telstra, Alcatel-Lucent and Fujitsu.