Carousel Industries, a leader in data networking and converged communications, has announced that Ed Wadbrook has joined the company as vice president of Applications/Collaborative Solutions. In the newly created role, he will be responsible for managing the applications and collaborative solutions team and developing new solutions designed to fulfill customers’ changing needs in Unified Communications.

"Customers continue to demand more from their applications and collaboration tools as part of their unified communications deployments,” said Dan Whalen, vice president of Engineering, Carousel Industries.  Ed will work to develop new solutions that complement and extend the UC Solutions we currently build for our customers.  His extended experience with communications-based solutions span all the critical application areas, Voice, Video, Data, Collaboration and Managed Services. That expertise will help to drive Carousel’s success in the UC space."

Ed Wadbrook joins Carousel Industries as vice president of Applications and Collaborative Solutions.

Wadbrook brings more than 25 years of experience in UC technology to Carousel. Prior to joining Carousel, he was the principal and founder of UC Advisors Group. Previously, Wadbrook was senior director of Unified Communications at Avaya, where he was responsible for leading the Avaya Aura Product Management organization. During his time managing the Avaya Aura product line, Wadbrook helped drive the success of Aura and transformed the organization from a seven-product technology silo to simplified go-to-market initiatives. He also co-led the product management integration of Nortel UC into Avaya upon Avaya’s acquisition of Nortel’s UC portfolio.

Prior to his work on Avaya Aura, Wadbrook was senior director of Unified Communications at Microsoft, where he led the strategy and business development for Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) and Microsoft Lync. He was instrumental in developing Microsoft’s vision and go-to-market strategy for unified communications and for driving Microsoft to become a leader in unified communications.

Wadbrook also held senior-level product marketing and management roles at Sonexis Corp., 3Com Corp., NBX Corp. and AT&T and Lucent Corp. He holds a B.S. in Marketing, with a minor in Economics, from the University of Rhode Island.

"Carousel recognizes the true promise of UC depends on significantly improving how people interact across multi-vendor environments,” said Wadbrook.  “Applications and collaborative solutions are what drive UC adoption for productivity gains, cost savings, and competitive differentiation. I’m excited about taking on this new role at Carousel and look forward to working with our customers to help them gain all the benefits from a truly unified communications solution."