Converged Network Services Group (CNSG) has hired a vice president of business development who boasts more than 20 years of experience on the vendor side of the channel.

Chris Shubert will lead “digital transformation, sales enablement and success strategies for partners and suppliers alike” for the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company.

Nitel’s Chris Shubert

“We are extremely excited to add Chris Shubert to the CNSG Team,” said Randy Friedberg, CNSG’s executive vice president of sales and marketing. “Chris has achieved success in every facet of the partner channel, and he has earned a reputation for excellence in our industry. We look forward to seeing the positive impact of Chris’ personality and dedication with our family of partners.”

Shubert most recently worked as Nitel‘s vice president of partner experience. His career includes two separate stints at Windstream, where he served as a director of national channel programs and a channel manager for master agents. He directed channel sales at Telnes (which GTT Communications acquired in 2016) in between his two Windstream tenures. He has worked primarily out of the Oklahoma City region.

He enjoyed success working with master agent partners and won multiple “Channel Manager of the Year” awards from Telarus.

“If my career has a mission, it’s to simplify technology for the benefit of partners and customers. CNSG shares that mission and has offered me an opportunity to do what I do on a scale far larger than I have been able to in the past,” Shubert said. “CNSG is extremely passionate about their partners’ success, and that fires me up. We have an opportunity to put our focus on the elements that really matter to our partners and suppliers so that we ride the digital transformation wave to untold levels of success.”

Shubert acknowledged his new job in a LinkedIn video post Monday. He said the change of scenery reflects the channel’s shift from a product-focused broker model to a consultant era that is focused on “the total solution.”

“Working for a supplier as I have for the past 20 years, there’s only so much I can do being focused on one platform, one product line,” he said. “So I was really happy to be able to work with all types of suppliers, all types of partners and ultimately all shapes and sizes of customers,” he said.

Learn more about Shubert by reading his profile on Nitel’s website.

CNSG dubs itself a “master distributor.” The company recently hired three new employees for its national sales and marketing teams.