Philonenko Leaves Avaya
Today, Avaya announced its Q1-19 results, and some organizational changes. Briefly, results were mixed with some positive developments on MM cloud revenue and an increase in large deal transactions.
Here, I want to focus on Laurent Philonenko’s (Phil-ah-nen-co) departure from Avaya to accept the CEO role At Servion.
I had assumed that Philonenko was going to remain at Avaya until retirement, so I was surprised to learn he his leaving. The lure of the CEO title is a strong one, but Philonenko has held the role before (Genesys).
I suppose it’s a good thing for Laurent as Servion is a nice company, but I am sorry to see him leave Avaya.
Servion is a customer experience solutions provider that is rapidly growing in the EMEA and APAC regions. It’s an Indian company with a strong presence in the US. Philonenko will continue to reside in California. Servion is an integrator, so works with Avaya and many other vendors.
Laurent is one of the most experienced executives in the contact center industry. He was hired into Avaya in 2013 and has held four technical leadership roles there. During the twenty years before Avaya, he held leadership positions at Cisco Collaboration, Genesys, and Alcatel-Lucent. He’s an avid pilot, and served in the French Air Force.
His most recent role at Avaya was leading several innovation initiatives including the Avaya Mobile Experience, Avaya Conversational Intelligence and the new mobile identity initiatives.
Philonenko, along with Nidal Abou-Ltaif were the only members of Chirico’s senior leadership that have been with Avaya for more than two years (though several of the newer execs previously worked at Avaya). Curiously, he and Nidal are also the only two senior executives reasonably active on Twitter.
Avaya veteran and VP David Chavez will assume Laurent’s responsibilities. Avaya also announced a change in CFO. Pat O’Malley transitions from CFO to SVP Growth Initiatives, and Kieran McGrath becomes the new SVP CFO.