With almost 20 years' senior strategic, sales leadership and business development experience, Alan Butterworth will play a central role in helping Edify build on its success across key markets, including financial services, retail, telecommunications and outsourcing. His main focus will be on developing the company's indirect and direct channels in the region to expand both geographic and vertical market coverage for Edify's voice and speech solutions.

Welcoming Butterworth's appointment, Jim Wambach, Edify's VP of Worldwide Sales Operations, commented: "We are committed to continuing to invest and build strength in our EMEA expansion programme. We know that our voice and speech solutions are ideally positioned to help organisations in EMEA increase their operational efficiency by automating speech processes and enhancing the quality of customer service at reduced cost. Alan's experience in the speech, packaged applications, outsourcing and IT solutions sectors, coupled with his proven sales success in key markets such as financial services and utilities, makes him ideally suited to getting this message across and to driving forward Edify's direct and indirect business across the EMEA region."

Alan Butterworth joins Edify from his previous role as a senior partner at Calleva Partners, the specialist IT sales, consulting and implementation business which focuses on the UK and European financial services sector. Before this he spent two years as Sales Director at natural language voice specialists, Vocalis, where he was responsible for developing the company's UK business sales function, securing major multi-million pound contracts in the utilities and financial services sectors, and building a partner/alliance model to broaden sales opportunities.

Earlier in his career, Alan Butterworth was Vice President of Business Development for 7C Ltd, the leading European outsourcer now part of Vertex, and a Business Development Director with CMG, the European ICT consultancy. He began his career as a software specialist in the defence and oil industries, and holds a BSc in Chemical Engineering from UMIST.