HPE Communications Technology Group (HPE CTG) has named Tom Craig as its new general manager.

The business counts more than 300 telco customers across 160 countries and was previously headed by Phil Mottram – formerly of Zayo – who was appointed President of HPE’s Intelligent Edge business earlier this year.

In a social media post, EVP and CFO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Tarek A. Robbiati, wrote: “HPE CTG has a tremendous opportunity, offering one of the broadest telco portfolios in the market spanning telco infrastructure, software and services. I’m confident that Tom will hit the ground running and scale the business to serve our customers and continue to grow HPE’s position in the telco space. Welcome to HPE, Tom!”

Having held senior roles with BT Global Services and Vodafone Group, Craig brings 31 years of telco experience to the new role. Most recently he has been working as a consultant for such telcos as Ooredoo, Millicom, and Tele2.

HPE in July of last year acquired Silver Peak for US$925 million – a move that allowed it to combine advanced SD-WAN offerings with Aruba’s Edge Service Platform (ESP) to simplify branch office and WAN deployments.

The CTG division was made official in February of this year, when HPE launched a software stack to support open, cloud-native 5G networks. At the time, Mottram said: “We are supporting both the telcos and the communications needs of the hyperscalers.”

In recent months, HPE has also partnered with Facebook and Microsoft on the Low-Carbon Patent Pledge, which saw the three allow open access to their IP on sustainability to support a low and zero-carbon future for the ICT industry.