Company veteran John Ieraci takes over as head of Telstra Purple

New Telstra Enterprise group executive Oliver Camplin-Warner has handed over leadership duties of the telco’s technology advisory and services division Telstra Purple to company veteran John Ieraci.

Telstra company veteran John Ieraci has taken over as head of the telco’s technology advisory and services business Telstra Purple, filling the vacancy left by Oliver Camplin-Warner’s recent appointment as Enterprise lead.

Previously heading Telstra’s defence & public sector unit, Ieraci will now be responsible for a practice with a headcount in excess of 2,000 staff covering cloud, data, AI, cybersecurity, networking and IoT services.

“This is an incredible opportunity to make a real difference for Australian industries and government, backed by a team of exceptional talent and partners,” Ieraci said of his appointment, describing the new position as particularly exciting on a personal level. “I’ve been involved with Telstra Purple since the very beginning, playing a role in developing our technology services strategy and working on our very first services acquisitions.”

Ieraci has spent the best part of three decades at Telstra across two stints dating back to 1990, rejoining the telco in Melbourne in 2007 after a brief stint as global business development manager at Ericsson. Since then he has held a number of senior leadership and executive positions, including as managed security services practice director, head of government & enterprise for Victoria and Tasmania, and chief customer officer for Telstra Enterprise.

“I have never met anyone who is as focused on real customer outcomes as John,” Camplin-Warner stated. “He’s someone who works in close partnership to solve problems through technology solutions and finds opportunities that make a real difference for our customers. It’s this, combined with his focus on nurturing our people and the potential of future technology, which makes me especially excited to see John step into this role.”

Taking over from inaugural head and now Wipro A/NZ managing director Christopher Smith, Camplin-Warner ultimately spent less than a year in the top Telstra Purple role before last month being promoted to replace departed boss David Burns as Telstra Enterprise group executive. Previously, Camplin-Warner served for five years as CEO of Telstra International out of Singapore, bringing an earlier background with IBM in the UK.

Sitting within the Enterprise division, Telstra Purple was formed in 2019 through the amalgamation of a number of earlier IT acquisitions, including VMtech, Kloud and Readify. Ieraci will now however be tasked with supporting the ongoing integration of Melbourne-based AWS cloud specialist Versent, picked up by Telstra toward the end of last year in a mammoth $267 million deal aimed at further accelerating the unit’s growth.