Cisco this week named an insider as its new head of U.S. and Canada channels. Wendy Bahr, most recently vice president, U.S. commercial channels is now VP of U.S./Canada channels, replacing Chuck Robbins who was promoted in December to senior VP of Cisco's U.S. commercial business.

In an interview with Network World's Cisco Subnet blogger Ken Presti, Bahr said it will be business as usual in the Cisco channels group, and said her 10-year stint at Verizon, most recently as sales director of the enterprise sales group, and her experience with Verizon and Cisco's federal groups would be applied to her new job.

Bahr joined Cisco in 2000 as an operations director of network service providers. She moved into Cisco's federal enterprise organization in 2004 as operations director of federal civilian agencies, before leading the U.S. commercial organization.