Nokia Enterprise President Kathrin Buvac is planning to leave the company to pursue an unspecified leadership opportunity, and Nokia has named Raghav Sahgal as the new president of Nokia Enterprise and as a member of the Nokia Group Leadership Team.
Buvac will step down on May 31 to take a leadership position at a global technology company. Sahgal, currently SVP of Nokia Software, will take over as president on June 1.
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Buvac has been with Nokia for 13 years and was with Siemens for seven years prior to that. “I both understand and support her desire to take on a new challenge,” said Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri, in a statement. “Kathrin has held key leadership positions at Nokia, including chief strategy officer, and has been at the heart of many of our transformational changes, including the turnaround of Nokia Siemens Networks and the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent.”
In her most recent role as president of Nokia Enterprise, Buvac led Nokia’s entry into the new customer segment focused on enterprise networks and industrial automation.
Both Nokia Enterprise and Nokia Software are strategic growth areas for the company.
Nokia Enterprise had revenues of $1.52 billion in 2019, an increase of 18% in constant currency from 2018. Customers include Deutsche Bahn, Florida Power & Light, Lufthansa Technik and BMW.
For his part, Sahgal joined Nokia in April 2017 from NICE Systems, where he served as president of the Asia Pacific and Middle East regions. Previously, he held a number of senior leadership positions with Oracle, Comverse, CSG and Lucent. Sahgal has been senior vice president of Nokia Software for three years.
Nokia created its Nokia Software business a few years ago to jump into the cloud-based telco software space. In its most recent earnings call, the company reported that Nokia Software's year-on-year constant currency net sales grew 12%.
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On that call Suri was asked if the company’s software and enterprise businesses overlapped. He said, “These are two different diversification areas,” and he said that Capex is available for both these business units.