Acme Packet (Nasdaq: APKT) on Monday bolstered its North American and Asia Pacific sales forces by naming Paul Wilson as Vice President for APAC sales, and Vin La Rocca as Vice President for North American Enterprise Sales.
In an effort to expand its enterprise opportunities, Acme also appointed Eric Rapisarda as VP of Enterprise Product Management and Marketing.
Wilson, La Rocca and Rapisarda all come to Acme with plenty of experience related to their new roles.
A 27-year telecom industry veteran, Wilson comes to Acme Packet from Riverbed Technology, where he served as APAC Manager of the Cascade Business Unit. Prior to Riverbed, Wilson laid a solid foundation of experience in the APAC market at Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) where he developed relationships with the region's top service providers.
La Rocca comes from Avaya, where he was the VP of Northeast, Global Accounts and Service Provider Sell To. He also held senior roles at NCR, Symbol and Cisco.
Finally, Rapisarda comes to Acme Packet from EMC, where he served as Director of Global Solutions and developing offerings for high-growth markets. Before EMC, Rapisarda held roles at Cambridge Strategic Management Group, Marconi Communications, and Tyco Electronics.
Beefing up these sales channels comes at a time when Acme Packet is seeing greater competition, especially in the enterprise segment of the SBC market, from Cisco.
According to Infonetics, Cisco surpassed Acme Packet in the enterprise session border controller (SBC) market race, taking a 26 percent market share in the first half of 2012.
Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics, said what's helped Cisco gain the lead over Acme Packet is Cisco's embedded enterprise customer base, where it has become a household name in data networking and phone systems.
"Cisco's been able to turn its market-leading position in IP PBXs, VoIP gateways, and data networking equipment into an advantage, upselling its enterprise SBCs to this customer base as they transition to services such as SIP trunking," said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics.
Acme Packet, however, is fighting back with the launch of the Net-Net 6300 SBC appliance, which it says can handle up to 200,000 signaled sessions, 80,000 media sessions and one million subscribers simultaneously.
With overall worldwide enterprise SBCs revenue reaching $82.5 million in the first half of 2012, Cisco isn't the only vendor Acme Packet, which will announce its Q3 2012 earnings on Oct. 25, should worry about.
Sonus (Nasdaq: SONS), a vendor that bolstered its enterprise SBC capabilities by purchasing Network Equipment Technologies, has become a bigger threat in the enterprise and service provider SBC market segment. Besides Sonus, Dialogic, GENBAND, and Metaswitch are also ramping up their respective SBC capabilities.
For more:
- see the release
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