Cisco Vet Jumps To Avaya As Corporate Strategy Boss

Allard is now part of Avaya's senior leadership team and reports directly to Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy. He will head up corporate strategy, analyst relations and strategic alliances and is in charge of how Avaya's vision and strategy are executed throughout the company.

Allard most recently was Cisco's vice president of sales and operations, global enterprise, responsible for sales, support and field operations in its Global Industries Client segment. Prior to Cisco, he spent 11 years at IBM.

[Related: Partners to Avaya: Be Clear on Radvision Integration, Channel Sales Plans ]

In the corporate strategy role at Avaya, Allard replaces Alan Baratz, who left the company earlier this spring.

Executive turnover has been rampant at Avaya, which this week named new professional services and operations vice presidents, but in the past few months has lost its head of global services, its vice president for R&D, its U.S. sales vice president, its unified communications chief, and its endpoints and video solutions boss, among other key roles.

All of those changes come as Avaya prepares for an IPO and has made a number of other significant moves, including a planned $230 million acquisition of Radvision and the launch of cloud services and a hosted UC strategy.

Like Allard, many of Avaya's senior executives are Cisco alumni, including Kennedy and Marc Randall, who joined Avaya as senior vice president and general manager, Avaya Networking, in January. Cisco, like Avaya, has seen substantial vice president-level executive changes in the past two years.