Freshtel names seasoned telco exec as CEO

Stuart Corner
Monday, 29 January 2007 04:46

IT People - People

Freshtel has appointed John Butkiewicz to the position of CEO to take over from founder Michael Carew who will "focus on the development and delivery of new wholesale partnering agreements both in Australia and overseas" in the new role of director of global business development.

The company has also named current director, Ken Loughnan, a former senior Telstra executive as its chairman to replace Len Taylor who will remain in the board as a non-executive director

Butkiewicz has over 30 years experience in the global telecommunications industry. He was most recently CTO at Huawei Technologies Australia and before that held positions with Alcatel, Ericsson, Link Telecoms and Telstra.

At Alcatel he was director, international and services leading a range of sales opportunities into Telstra, TelstraClear in New Zealand, and Reach and CSL in Hong Kong. At Ericsson he established and ran the bid management group, headed up the services marketing team and acted in the director, mobiles marketing. At Link, once Australia's largest paging services operator, he was head of operations

Before that he spent over 20 years at Telstra in engineering, project/program management, product management, commercial, operations and business planning and strategy roles.

Loughnan, a former MD of Telecom Australia International, joined the Freshtel board in June 2006. He is also of the Skilled Group (ASX: SKE).