Nitin Kawale was hired by former Rogers CEO Guy Laurence when he took over in late 2013.Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
Two weeks into Joe Natale's tenure as chief executive officer of Rogers Communications Inc., a third top executive recruited by his predecessor is leaving.
Nitin Kawale, the former head of Cisco Systems Canada Co., was a high-profile hire for former Rogers CEO Guy Laurence, who assembled a new team to run the company after taking over in late 2013.
Mr. Laurence saw growth in the business services market as a key priority, making it one of seven planks in his strategic plan for Rogers, and tapped Mr. Kawale to run a newly reorganized enterprise division.
But after Mr. Laurence's own exit from the company in October, several members of his team have followed him out the door. Chief corporate officer Jacob Glick (previously an executive with Google Inc.) left in March, while chief strategy officer Frank Boulben (previously with BlackBerry Ltd.) left at the end of April.
There has been speculation within the company about who else might leave as Mr. Natale, who assumed the CEO's job two weeks ago, takes over and begins building his own team.
Rogers confirmed Thursday that Mr. Kawale will be leaving the company.
"Nitin Kawale has decided to move on from Rogers and focus on his philanthropic and community activities. We thank him for his contributions to our enterprise business," Rogers senior vice-president of communications Terrie Tweddle said in an e-mail.
To recruit Mr. Kawale away from Cisco in December, 2014, Rogers paid him a $500,000 cash sign-on bonus and also granted him share-based awards that vest over time worth a total of $3-million.
About half of the big-name executives who joined Rogers while Mr. Laurence was CEO are still with the company. Deepak Khandelwal, also a former Google executive, is chief customer officer and Dirk Woessner, previously with Deutsche Telekom, heads up the consumer business division, which makes him responsible for cable and the company's key wireless business.
Rick Brace, the onetime Bell Media executive who replaced Keith Pelley as head of Rogers's media unit in 2015 (when Mr. Pelley departed to run the European Tour, a professional golf circuit), also remains with Rogers.
Under Mr. Kawale, revenue at the business solutions division – which provides networking and data centre services – grew by 2 per cent in 2016 to $384-million, while adjusted operating profit increased by 6 per cent to $123-million.
But that unit is only one part of the company's broader enterprise unit, which also includes cable and wireless services sold to business customers. Two sources close to Rogers say its overall enterprise unit is growing at a faster rate than the business solutions division alone.
Mr. Natale himself has a strong background in the business telecom market, having joined Telus Corp. in 2003 to lead its enterprise solutions division. He later held increasingly senior roles and was CEO for just over a year before Darren Entwistle returned to that position in 2015.
"We think Joe Natale's prior experience and expertise in the business segment bode well for Rogers's business solutions segment, which historically has under-indexed in the business market," BMO analyst Tim Casey wrote in a recent research report on Mr. Natale's top priorities for his first 100 days at Rogers.
Rogers negotiated a deal with Telus to allow Mr. Natale out of his non-compete arrangement with his former employer to join the Toronto-based cable operator two months early.