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AT&T Australia puts on 24 staff

IT People - Enterprise

Global telco, AT&T, has appointed 24 new staff to support its continued growth in the Australian market.

Four staff will be joining AT&T's sales and global account management teams in Sydney and Melbourne, while another twenty have recently joined AT&T's Asia Pacific regional service delivery team based in Sydney.

Jeyan Jeevaratnam, managing director of AT&T Australia and New Zealand, said AT&T is winning market share from competitors in the relatively mature Australian market.

"In the past three years, AT&T has made significant investments in Australia to build a state-of-the-art MPLS network that includes six nodes and an Internet Data Centre (IDC) in Sydney. We have been growing our retail revenue at over three times the market average," said Jeevaratnam. "In fact, excluding Japan, Australia is now AT&T's number one revenue generator in the Asia Pacific region.

"Last year the majority of our revenue in Australia was generated from contracts initiated, negotiated and closed locally, so the addition of extra staff to our account management and service delivery teams will enable us to cope with this ongoing growth, providing our existing and new customers with even higher levels of service."

Australia has also been selected as the service delivery workcentre supporting the Asia Pacific region, excluding Japan and is the main hub for the enablement and implementation management of AT&T's client networks across the region.

Asia Pacific director for service delivery, Dominic DeFina, said "AT&T has employed an additional 20 implementation managers and customer network engineers based in Sydney along with the roll-out of AT&T's Labs designed state-of-the art global ordering, provisioning and project management tools, to support the delivery and enablement of customer networks throughout Asia Pacific."

The new staff joining AT&T's sales and account management teams are:

George Afonczenko joins the Melbourne team as a regional account director. Afonczenko brings over 20 years' experience in the IT&T industry to AT&T. He has held a number of senior roles in sales and project management at BT, MCI, Optus and NEC.

Jason Yu joins the Melbourne team as a solutions architect. Yu comes from MCI where he spent the last four years as a technical sales consultant and prior to that he was with NEC also for four years as a data communications engineer.

Spiro Tsironis joins the Melbourne team as a client services manager. Tsironis previously worked at BT from 2000 as a client services manager and senior project coordinator.

Rob Hueston is based in Sydney as a regional account director. Hueston has over 10 years IT&T experience. Most recently he held a number of senior positions at Optus including marketing manager and senior account manager responsible for select Asia Pacific accounts.

The 20 additional staff that have joined AT&T's service delivery team will support the roll-out of services to new and existing customers. These additions follow AT&T's recent move to a new head office location in North Sydney.