Avaya Hires Former BroadSoft, Comcast Exec as Chief Revenue Officer

**Editor’s Note: Click here to see which channel people were on the move in February.**

Avaya has appointed Tara Dunning, formerly BroadSoft’s vice president of global sales operations, to fill the newly created position of chief revenue officer.

Dunning’s responsibilities include all revenue-generation processes, from offer development, to pricing, enablement, sales and channel operations, and tools and automation. She is returning to Avaya, where she led teams in global sales operations and business transformation. Prior to Avaya, she held positions with Comcast Cable and Unisys.

Avaya’s Tara Dunning

Dunning tells Channel Partners the channel community has been a major part of Avaya’s success and renewed momentum in the past months.

“I believe they are critical to our future success and transformation, and it is my intention to work hand in hand with them as Avaya develops strategies and road maps for our solutions and emerging technologies,” she said. “We plan to continue to maintain open dialogue to identify and remove barriers to our mutual success and speed commerce. I’ve made a career of building teams and working collaboratively to successfully drive transformation and new growth, and look forward to continuing the work with our partner community to build on our winning track record.”

Dunning also will drive revenue accountability and predictability across all revenue-generating teams.

“Our aspiration is to drive greater predictability in the sales cycle, improved customer engagement and increased demand generation activities,” she said. “I intend to start by developing a playbook of key activities that support the objectives while also introducing better enablement programs and process improvements. Avaya is already engaged in addressing current pain points and near-term improvement priorities, while also keeping an eye to longer-term transformation. It is our intention to deliver simplified offers and processes that drive long-term value for customers, with a greater focus on channel teaming and enablement.”

Last week, Avaya unveiled a new master-agent program focused on accelerating cloud sales to small and midmarket businesses.

Avaya has “incredible growth opportunities ahead” as its customers move to new solutions that can transform the communications experience, particularly via the cloud and with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and more, Dunning said.

“The balance will be to fuel innovation while simplifying and aligning to serve our customers better than anyone,” she said. “I plan to work to optimize our people, processes and systems to transform our go-to-market, and sales and channel enablement. With a consistent go-to-market approach, focus on customer needs, and the power of our channel, I think we will have an unbeatable combination.”

“Bringing a proven leader like Tara Dunning back to Avaya is another big win for the company and for our customers.” said Patrick O’Malley, Avaya’s senior vice president and chief financial officer. “As we go on offense to fuel new growth, Tara’s outside-in, customer-led focus in leading strategic transformation initiatives will help us retool our go-to-market approach, focusing on efficiencies that help us deliver solutions the market needs, faster and more effectively. We believe she will have an impact that helps accelerate growth for our customers, our partners and Avaya.”