By Bevin Fletcher 

As T-Mobile works to gain a bigger piece of the enterprise pie, the operator is bringing on George Fischer, a former leader of Verizon’s global enterprise business, to head up sales for the T-Mobile for Business unit.

Fischer was named SVP of Sales for T-Mobile for Business (TfB), and is replacing 14-year T-Mobile veteran James Kirby who is retiring. Fischer will report directly to president of the T-Mobile Business Group, Mike Katz.

Among the big three carriers, AT&T and Verizon largely dominate the enterprise space. T-Mobile has set a goal of doubling its enterprise market share from less than 10 per cent to 20 per cent within the next five years, with Fischer poised to help lead the charge. In his new role Fischer is leading the T-Mobile for Business sales team across small business, public sector, and enterprise, where he’ll be responsible for driving customer growth and acquisition. 

Fischer is joining T-Mobile from his most recent position as Chief Relationship Management Officer and SVP of Global Sales at global payments and financial technology services company Fiserv. Before that he spent more than six years as a senior Verizon executive, most recently as president of the carrier’s Global Enterprise segment until the end of 2020 where he directed sales, operations and marketing teams of 4,500 employees.

Before Verizon, Fischer held a variety of executive sales roles at global enterprise software provider CA Technologies for 15 years. He’s currently a member of the Visiting Committee for Advanced Technology (VCAT) at NIST.

Among contributions at Verizon, Fischer helped introduce 5G enterprise edge architecture and solutions, according to LinkedIn.

Verizon has been a leader in terms of 5G edge efforts, launching both commercial public and private network offerings and boasting partnerships with major cloud players. T-Mobile, for its part has MEC trials underway with enterprises and inked a partnership with Lumen over the summer to target enterprise and government users with joint 5G and MEC services.

The T-Mobile announcement today called out the operator’s own plans to deliver advanced 5G network services including multi-access edge computing and private networks to market this year, saying they present opportunities for Fischer to drive more growth in its business segment.

And T-Mobile highlighted Fischer’s extensive expertise in global tech businesses and large-scale sales operations, citing experience in growing business and selling complex technologies and services like software-defined networking for enterprise.

There were also hints about plans for standalone 5G services. T-Mobile called out its position as 5G leader and the milestone of a nationwide SA 5G launch that brings associated benefits for business customers as one of the things that attracted Fischer to the new role. 

“For instance, SA 5G will eventually unlock blazing fast speeds in more places, lower latency for real-time responses & massive connectivity. This is where future transformative applications are made possible..,” T-Mobile said.

Still, T-Mobile has work to do in terms of recognition in the enterprise space. Katz acknowledged in November that “enterprises still don’t know that we compete in this category,” but that lack of awareness means a lot more room for growth to tap into.

The operator has been working to build awareness and in December touted a win with Alaska Airlines, which picked T-Mobile as its preferred wireless provider.