Ciena taps Microsoft's Benoit de la Tour to lead EMEA division

Ciena (Nasdaq: CIEN) has taken the next step to expand its presence in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market by naming Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Benoit de la Tour as the region's vice president and general manager.

de la Tour comes to Ciena with more than 20 years of experience in sales, services and marketing in the software industry.

In his new role, he will guide Ciena's EMEA customers and partners as they transform their networks to handle high-bandwidth services and applications, such as cloud computing, bandwidth-on-demand and software defined networking (SDN).

One of the particular initiatives he will drive will be to help service provider and enterprise customers migrate to Ciena's multi-disciplinary OPn network that leverages the company's expertise in optical, packet and software.

Before coming to Ciena, de la Tour served as vice president, EMEA and Latin America at Microsoft, where he led growth initiatives within the software vendor's Business Solutions Division (MBS). Earlier, he held a number of executive positions at Infor and Information Builders, two major Enterprise Business Applications vendors.

He will be based at Ciena's EMEA headquarters in London.

EMEA was a challenging market for optical players in Q3 2013, a time when WDM spending declined on a year-over-year and sequential basis, nearing the record low set in Q1 2013.

For more:
- see the release

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