NovaSparks Names Baetz to Run North American Ops, US Sales

In its second strategic hire of 2011, NovaSparks has named Olivier Baetz vice president of sales and operations for North America. Baetz’s appointment follows that of Matthew Gadd, who joined in February as vice president of operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

NovaSparks is a provider of ultra-low latency, hardware programming and data packet processing solutions.

Reporting to CEO Yves Charles, Baetz will be responsible for NovaSparks’ North American operations and for US sales. He previously spent 10 years at BT Radianz, where he ran the North American Sales Engineering team until 2009, and was instrumental in the creation of the original Radianz Ultra low-latency connectivity service. In 2009, he took over the responsibility for building and leading the global technical convergence project team responsible for integrating the Radianz platform into the global BT Network.

From 1996 until 2001, Baetz worked for Equant, where he designed and built complex data and voice connectivity solutions for a number of European-based financial institutions. Equant, now part of France Telecom’s Orange Business Services, was the original vehicle for Reuters’ spin-off of its global network.