Colt has appointed Jürgen Hernichel to replace Simon Walsh as the lead for Colt Enterprise Services (CES). Hat tip to The Register's Paul Kunert for bringing this to our attention yesterday evening - see the original story here.
Walsh joined Colt in February 2011 from Computacenter, where he was UK MD and played an instrumental role in growing the services business. Jon Bennett (who joined in June 2012, and also spent time at Computacenter), VP in charge of Strategy, Portfolio Development and Acquisitions at CES, has also left. Both departures have been confirmed by Colt.
As we have said before, Colt’s key challenge is to offset the declines from legacy products, such as Voice, with much faster-growing business in areas such as cloud services (see here and work back: Voice pulls on Colt’s Q3 revenues). Cloud and hosting services sit within the CES business and Colt must now turn its “significant" platform investments into a much larger revenue stream. We assume the Board is now of the view that Hernichel (who is an in-house hire, but worked for T-Systems in the past) is best placed to make that happen.