Benoit has over 17 years of comprehensive I.T. and telecommunications industry experience, built upon a solid technical background, and developed through multiple international sales and marketing management positions for large and small companies.
Benoit started his career in 1987 as a development engineer working on an in-board real-time flight assistance expert system for the European Rafale jet fighter. He then moved on to his first customer-centric role as an AI solutions engineer, for Groupe Bull. After spending two years as Product Manager in charge of one of the first commercially available RISC servers on the market, he went on to spend four years in the U.S.A. as Director, OEM Sales, for Groupe Bull’s Open Systems Division. Back in Europe in 1996, he was appointed Director, Marketing, for Systar, a software vendor specializing in quality of service and business processes surveillance, based in Paris, France. He then chose to fully embrace the telecommunications sector and was hired as Sales Manager by Kenan Systems, based in London, UK, at the time an unknown name in the telecoms billing space. He was instrumental in the quick growth of the European business to a leading market share and, at the time Lucent Technologies purchased Kenan Systems for VALUE.4bn in 2000, he was Director, Sales, EMEA, with a turnover of million per annum. He retained this position as Director, Sales, for Lucent Technologies’ Software Product Group until the appeal to participate to growing a new business from the beginning became too strong. He went on to launched the European Service Providers business unit for Netigy Corporation (an e-business infrastructure consulting firm backed by Cisco, based in San Jose, CA), and was most recently VP, Strategy & Marketing, for Telisma, a leading speech recognition software vendor spun off from France Telecom’s R&D division (CNET).
