Symbol Technologies appoints Jan Burton to lead EMEA region

Burton will oversee EMEA operations, spearheading the development of Symbol's sales and services capabilities in the region, and continue to deliver strategic and consistent business velocity. Burton will continue to support the EMEA channel to drive the sales engagement between Symbol's sales force and partners, and continue to develop the award-winning PartnerSelect Program.

Reporting to Todd Abbott, Symbol's senior vice president of worldwide sales and operations, Burton has been vice president of worldwide channels for Symbol since June 2003, and has grown the channel business to more than US $1 billion, and increased Symbol's channel centricity from 45% to nearly 70%. Symbol's PartnerSelect Program under Burton's leadership has gained integrity and credibility in the marketplace, and has enabled Symbol to take an industry-leading channel position.

'We are very pleased to have Jan Burton lead our EMEA operations. Selecting Jan for this position is a testament to her industry knowledge, astute business acumen and unwavering dedication to establishing a world-class channel organisation,' said Abbott.

'A seasoned Symbol senior executive of three years, Jan is also an industry veteran with a wide span of international experience who has more than two decades of sales development, business leadership and marketing management experience in the global technology space.'

Prior to Symbol, Burton spent a considerable amount of time living in Europe while with Apple Computer as director of EMEA education sales. Whilst at Lucent Technologies, Burton was based in Brussels as the director of EMEA marketing, and later as Lucent's managing director of EMEA channel sales.'

At Symbol, Burton led the development and launch of Symbol's PartnerSelect Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partner Program in April 2005, further developing the partner ecosystem with a broad set of industry applications that provide an end-to-end enterprise mobility solution for customers. The program enables qualified software application developers to leverage technical, sales and marketing enablement programs, aiming to better serve their customers, and help to increase their revenue and profitability. Symbol's Solutions Validation Program reinforces Symbol's commitment to customers to help increase speed of deployment and validation of enterprise mobility solutions, and increase confidence for customers that they will deploy a successful solution from the start. To date, in EMEA, nearly 60 ISVs have joined the program.

Additionally, for the third consecutive year, Symbol's PartnerSelect Program attained VARBusiness magazine's distinguished 5-Star rating, as well as substantially increased partner satisfaction and loyalty.

'Over the past few years, my team and I have worked hard to build a strong global channel infrastructure that would enable Symbol to better serve our customers' enterprise mobility needs,' said Burton. 'In my new role, the three key priorities I will focus on is to work closely with the existing EMEA sales and service team and our partners to improve our customer satisfaction, develop our joint business in enterprise mobility; and continue to build Symbol's leadership position leveraging recent product launches such as the MC70, the first rugged Enterprise Digital Assistant (EDA).'

Burton will relocate to EMEA in April, and will be based out of Symbol's EMEA headquarters in Winnersh, England. Abbott will assume the global channel leadership role until a new lead is appointed.