"Joe brings a wealth of knowledge and senior sales management experience across a broad range of technologies and services to Zebra,” said Anders Gustafsson, chief executive officer of Zebra Technologies. "I have the utmost confidence that Joe will contribute strong leadership centered on the needs of our customers and partners during this exciting time of growth and integration for Zebra.”

For most of his career, Mr. Heel, 49, has been involved in the management and development of sales strategy for technology and services companies. Over the past 10 years, Mr. Heel has worked with IBM, Avaya and Sun Microsystems. At IBM, Mr. Heel led sales for the company’s entire set of products and services to enterprise customers across Germany, Austria and Switzerland and more recently in the U.S. Midwest, each  representing approximately $4 billion in annual revenue. Prior to his role at IBM, Mr. Heel was SVP of Avaya Global Services, a $2.5 billion, 8,000-employee business. Before Avaya, Mr. Heel worked at Sun Microsystems, running parts of the sales as well as the service organisation of the $15 billion company. Mr. Heel was also a partner at McKinsey and Company, where he worked for 13 years.

"Zebra is in a perfect position to capitalise on the Internet of Things by bringing the power of information to the intelligent management of the physical world. I believe we will have significant opportunities to provide essential business intelligence to customers and partners across the enterprise,” said Mr. Heel. "I am thrilled to join a talented and proven team to help expand Zebra’s global reach and relevance to businesses of all sizes.”

Mr. Heel grew up in Germany, speaks four different languages and has lived abroad while leading global sales organisations.He has received M.B.A. and M.S. degrees from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.