BlackBerry appoints Cisco’s warhorse Carl Wiese as its new global chief of sales

BlackBerry Limited announced Carl Wiese as the president for its global sales operations. Wiese will lead the company's global market sales stratagem in an attempt to throttle the declining sales for BlackBerry.

The appointment of Wiese came at a critical time, as the smartphone maker seeks for a boost in sales across the world.

Carl Wiese brings in with him more than a decade of leadership and expertise according to a report from Reuters. His former affiliation includes chief of advanced technology sales, global collaboration business and product sales at Cisco Systems. He specialized in web conferencing and security aspects during his senior leadership designations at Cisco, which exactly are the arenas that BlackBerry is eyeing to widen under the leadership of its new global sales head. He will be replacing John Sims, who was associated with BlackBerry for the last 18 months. Wiese also proudly held senior executive positions at Texas Instruments, Lucent, Avaya and Apple. BlackBerry refrained from furnishing any info pertaining to the departure of John Sims.

"We are delighted to welcome Carl Wiese - a veteran sales lead - to our company and steer our global sales operations," said CEO and Executive Chairman for BlackBerry, John Chen. "We will stick to our commitment to work with our patrons and provide them with the most secure and groundbreaking solutions, with Carl Wiese playing a pivotal role here. Wiese holds vast experience in innovative technology and enterprise software solutions, which are very instrumental for BlackBerry, as the company is focusing more towards nurturing profit rate and bracing revenue," explained Chen in the an official Press Release from Blackberry.

The move chips in within a month after the company posted plummeting sales growth garnered from software business during the first business quarter.

Chen has set a revenue goal of $500 Million for the company to achieve in the current financial year. He aims to achieve the target through software solutions with a hope that device management software solutions might replace the company's conventional fee structure and declining smartphone sales. Last month, Chen indicated that acquisitions would play a vital role in helping the company reach the said target of $500 Million according to a report by The Globe and Mail.

Few tech analysts seem to be skeptical about BlackBerry's software revenue goals. Thus, all we can say is that, it would be interesting to see how BlackBerry fares in global sales growth under the leadership of veteran sales lead Carl Wiese.

To conclude, for all the curious BlackBerry fanatics, the company is also expected to roll out its first Android smartphone flagship later this year.

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