Applaud, the managed IT and service desk provider, has appointed Mark Richards as its new Sydney-based managed services practice manager.

Richards' main areas of responsibility include infrastructure outsourcing services, service desk support, asset management, remote management and monitoring, storage management, data centre and cloud management.

Richards has more than 15 years experience in project management and 10 in the IT industry. He recently worked as principal solution architect at Dell Australia, where he was responsible for scoping complex managed services solutions, including solution design, tender response, cost modelling and risk management. He also worked for Telstra as a national incident manager and was with CBA, Datacom, IBM and ING Australia.

"Mark's skills and experience in project management and the delivery of strategies which result in service provider leadership will be of major benefit to Applaud... He will be driving a series of continual service improvement programs to ensure our quality of service achieves best industry standards," said Ricci Danieletto, Applaud's managing director.

Applaud has clients such as Aristocrat, The Observatory Hotel, Pan Pacific Hotel Group and Virgin Mobile.