[February 21, 2005]

Know Thy Keynoters: Stef van Aarle of Lucent

By David Sims, TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist

On Wednesday at ITEXPO, Lucent’s Stef van Aarle will speak at 9:00 a.m. Also, Lucent shareholders narrowly down a proposal to revamp executive pay.

A Dutchman with a degree in Applied Physics from Delft University and a post-graduate degree in Business Administration from the University of Eindhoven, van Aarle joined AT&T and Philips Telecommunications in 1986 and held numerous positions in Sales Support, Marketing and Product Management in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region for AT&T.

When Lucent Technologies split from AT&T during 1996, van Aarle was the director for the CIO organization for EMEA. He managed the split of the IT infrastructure of AT&T and Lucent in EMEA, and instituted Service Level Agreements to manage the IT deliveries to the business.

After managing a large-scale change program for the European sales teams, van Aarle became vice president responsible for developing and managing the Switching Solutions business for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

In December 2000, van Aarle transferred from the Netherlands to New Jersey, as Vice President for Global Product Marketing and Strategy for the Switching Solutions Group. Later he became Vice President of Business Development for all of Lucent’s wireline business.

Van Aarle joined Lucent Worldwide Services in December 2002, where he has been instrumental in building the Professional Services business. Currently he is Vice President of Marketing and Strategy, a role in which he oversees the LWS Marketing Strategy, Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing functions.

He is also responsible for driving multi-vendor business development.

This past week Lucent shareholders “narrowly rejected a proposal to tie executive pay to performance,” according to Scott Moritz at TheStreet.com.

“The company had opposed the measure,” Moritz writes, “which was offered up by a Lucent investor as governance gadflies seethe over runaway CEO pay at big companies.”

Preliminary numbers, tallied at Lucent's annual shareholder meeting in Wilmington, Del., show that 48% of voting shareholders backed a plan to base executive stock compensation on objective criteria including stock appreciation and the company's operating performance.

As Moritz notes, “the proposal fared much better than did a similar measure last year. Back then, only 27% of Lucent holders voted to terminate stock and severance agreements with the top five executives.”

David Sims is contributing editor and CRM Alert columnist for TMCnet.