Sierra Wireless shakes up execs, cuts jobs

Sierra Wireless made a handful of changes to its executive team and announced job cuts related to its recent acquisition of the French firm Wavecom.

The Canadian company said Didier Dutronc, formerly Wavecom's chief sales officer, will become senior vice president of marketing. Philippe Guillemette, Wavecom's former CTO will take over as Sierra's senior vice president of advanced technology. Pierre Teyssier, formerly Wavecom's COO, will become Sierra's senior vice president of engineering. Emmanuel Walckenaer will continue in his current role as CEO of Anyware Technologies and will also become a senior vice president and the general manager of solutions and services. His focus will be on growing the solutions and services business of the combined company.

Sierra said that because of all of the reshuffling, Anders Franzen, the CEO of Wavecom's U.S. subsidiary, and Steve Blaine, Sierra's current senior vice president of engineering, will both leave the company in September.

Additionally, Sierra said, as part of a previously announced plan, it cut 77 jobs from a Wavecom office in France. Most of the cuts will be complete by the end of the second quarter.

Sierra acquired Wavecom, a company that makes machine-to-machine wireless technology, for around $277 million in December. The move was a large one for Sierra, which decided to pull the plug on a much smaller proposed acquisition of wireless networking firm Cradlepoint last July.

For more:
- see this release [1]

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