VMware announced today that it will be expanding its focus on telecommunications carriers, promoting Shekar Ayyar to executive vice president and general manager of the company's Telco Group.

Ayyar will report to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and will continue to lead corporate business development activities.

Ayyar will be helping promote VMware's role in network functions virtualization (NFV). He'll also be pushing the company's Cross-Cloud Architecture, which is meant to help companies deploy a multifunction NFV platform and help IT professionals manage network and security functions in multiple clouds.

VMware has been making clear moves toward NFV, such as recently hiring Gabriel Di Piazza as vice president of Telco NFV products. The company has more than 80 NFV product deployments with products such as vSphere, vCloud Director, and NSX.

Prior to his current position, Ayyar led VMware’s strategy and corporate development where he was, and still is, responsible for aligning strategy across VMware businesses as well as managing the company’s mergers, acquisitions, and investments. He helped with VMware’s acquisitions of Nicira and AirWatch.

Before VMware, Ayyar held senior roles at Lucent Technologies (acquired by Nokia as part of Alcatel-Lucent), BindView (acquired by Symantec), and Instantis (acquired by Oracle).

Aside from Di Piazza and Ayyar, VMware also promoted Raghu Raghuram and Rajiv Ramaswami to lead its new Products and Cloud Services organization last month.