Telstra Names Kris Schaffer Canadian Country Lead

Telstra has appointed Kris Schaffer Canada country lead to drive accelerated growth out of the Toronto area. An IT and telecom professional, he has filled both leadership and customer-facing roles at IBM, Bell Canada and TELUS Communications.

In addition, Karl Paterson, a sales executive with more than 10 years of telco and technology industry experience has been brought onboard as a business development executive, reporting directly to Schaffer.

Telstra Americas recently opened a new office in Toronto and upgraded infrastructure to connect Canada to its trans-Pacific subsea cable networks. These subsea cable networks carry data from Canada into the Asia-Pacific region, where Telstra owns and operates the largest subsea cable system (with more than 400,000 km of subsea cables globally) and currently carries nearly one-third of all Asia-Pacific internet traffic.

The company will enable Canadian companies, including those in the technology and media, financial, oil and gas, and mining sectors to seamlessly connect to markets across Asia to support their growth strategies and to help address new or increasing capacity demands and connectivity in the region.

Schaffer has deep experience with Canada’s largest enterprises through her 20+ year career, and is a regular speaker and contributor at industry events and forums. Most recently she was business development executive at ISM Canada, a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM, where she helped companies with cloud-based business intelligence, advanced analytics and big data solution initiatives.

Prior to ISM Canada, she was enterprise sales client director for Compugen, senior sales account executive with Long View Systems and a regional manager for Mitel Networks Solutions. She was with Bell Canada as account executive for eight years in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Paterson returns to the Telstra organization after relocating from Australia to Toronto in 2020. He previously had worked as an enterprise key account manager for some of Australia’s largest organizations with Telstra Enterprise in Melbourne, Australia, initially joining the organization as part of its graduate program. He has a bachelor’s degree in business administration and management from the University of South Australia.