Integrated collaboration experts ELB (ELECTROBOARD), had announced its new Australian leadership team led by Mario Hilmi (feature image), alongside ‘ELB Accelerate’, its new EX-CX strategic plan to fast-track Australian business growth.

Hilmi has joined ELB as general manager sales and marketing, based in Sydney.

His appointment follows a successful tenure at BlueJeans where, as APAC channel and business development director, he established the business’ footprint across the region.

Prior to this, he held senior roles within the Polycom Australia and New Zealand business.

Hilmi will be responsible for leading the charge on ELB Accelerate across the Australian business, which comes at a time when ELB is seeing a surge in customer demand for transformational workspaces.

It covers investments in people, sites and technology.

ELB is predicting double-digit growth in sales over the coming 24 months as more Australian businesses seek transformational technology and future-focused, redesigned workspaces.

ELB has earnt a reputation as one of Australia’s industry pioneers within the audiovisual and unified communications sector.

ELB founder and director Marie Bolton says Mr. Hilmi is an experienced APAC sales and business development director with a hugely successful history of working in the software as a service (SaaS) environment as well as hardware.

She says he brings extensive voice, video and data convergence experience to ELB coupled with an extensive network of industry contacts.

“Mario is well-known for his impactful approach and we’re thrilled to have him leading our Australia-based team as we gear up for our next phase of growth,” Bolton said.

“His appointment is strategically timed to support our aggressive growth strategy in Australia which includes continued investment in people, facilities and technology.

“We’re adding new state-of-the-art customer experience centres across the country to showcase what intelligent collaborative environments could be like and we plan to double our headcount in Australia over the next 24 months.

“Mario’s energy and enthusiasm are pivotal to leading our growing team and creating a positive workplace culture and we’re delighted to have him on board.”

Hilmi will spearhead a newly appointed ELB senior leadership team comprising sales and functional leaders including the recent addition of Sean Hooper as CFO and Sharonika Camplin as head of marketing.

Hooper is a seasoned CFO with global expertise across technology, energy and resources sectors.

Camplin has more than 20 years’ experience working in the technology sector most recently as director of regional campaign development for voice and video conferencing vendor Polycom where she led a multi-national team across Asia Pacific.

Hilmi intends making further strategic appointments to strengthen ELB’s bench strength in key sales territories throughout Australia, develop new vendor partnerships, modernising office spaces, as well as making further investments to bolster brand, marketing and technology platforms to improve efficiency and speed-to-market.

“The way in which people are communicating has changed dramatically in the past five years thanks to new technologies, the cloud, and more recently, the internet of things and that’s driven a change in the way workplaces are being designed with open-plan offices, huddle spaces and flexible working,” Hilmi said.

“Our team is focused on simplifying these paradigm shifts for our customers, enabling them to join conversations, share, engage and interact with information and content as easily as possible.”

Ecosystm principal advisor, enterprise communications, contact centre, & CX Audrey William says the rise of the freelance economy in the US is another watch-out for Australian businesses.

“Workplaces need to be better equipped for ‘giggers’, people taking on contract or freelance work within an office setting. By 2027, 86.5 million people will be freelancing in the US making up 50.9 percent of the total US workforce according to Statista,” said William.

“These workers are used to working in collaborative, modern environments and expect a seamless and secure setting when transitioning to another company, even for a short-time.

“This means more businesses need to make allowances.

“Open offices are good but different staff dynamics means you also need private rooms and huddle spaces fully equipped for seamless collaboration.

“We expect this trend to follow in Australia particularly as the new generation of employees continue to enter the workforce and older workers look for more flexibility.”

ELB is widely known as a pioneer of the digital classroom, leading the introduction of 150,000 interactive whiteboards into Australia and equipping thousands of schools as well as enterprise customers. Today, the company is focused on pioneering simplicity with robust solutions support.

Hilmi says he is excited to have arrived at such a crucial point in the company’s growth.

“Having the benefit of working in the vendor space, I’ve seen some pivotal shifts in customer demands take place,” he said.

“CIOs and IT managers are finding it hard to navigate the complex and busy unified communications landscape of today while also preparing for the ever-changing future needs of their workforce.

“I haven’t seen an organisation really solve the issue until now and that’s the reason I chose to join ELB.

“With the move to cloud-based services, the market has moved to a point where customers today shouldn’t need expensive consultants or big project teams to be able to collaborate easily across their organisation.

“ELB’s value add comes through the ongoing investments to build an innovative, simple and affordable one-stop solution across the customer lifecycle backed by 24/7 Australian support and that is regardless of the technology.

“It’s a huge change in the way service offerings are provided today to the Australian market and we see a lot of potential.”