CALGARY – Longtime Shaw Cable executive Randy Elliot will be retiring on Oct. 31, 2005, company CEO Jim Shaw announced yesterday.
Elliot (right), currently Senior Vice-President of Technical Operations, joined Shaw in 1971, becoming the first person hired to look after the company’s technical aspects.
Colleagues were quick to say how he’s made a huge contribution to the industry.
“He’s been contributing to the rapid expansion of technology in the cable industry: telephones, data, digital, high definition, and fibre,” says Dick Green, president and CEO of Cable Television Laboratories, the research consortium for the cable industry. Elliot has been on Cablelabs’ Technical Advisory Committee for probably the last 15 years, Green says.
“I think the industry is now poorer because of his retirement, but it’s well-earned and he deserves to get some time off, because I know he’s been working hard,” Green says.
Elliot’s boss feels the same way. “Randy’s contributions to the success of the company have been chronicled in the Shaw Family History Above and Beyond and they are significant. If there were a builder category in the Canadian Cable Hall of Fame, Randy’s name would be prominent,” says Jim Shaw in a memo. “One of Randy’s greatest legacies will be the terrific staff he has attracted to our company to take on the challenges of product and application development and new growth opportunities.”
Elliot had staying power in Shaw because he understood the corporate culture, says Steve Quinn, president of TVC Canada, an equipment supplier to Shaw and other cablecos. “Randy ‘got it.’ His job was to get stuff built. Get it built to support whatever the boys were coming up with to sell to the customers. And his role was to carry it and make sure it works technically.”
“He’s the master of the low-profile, get-it-done kind of guy,” Quinn says. “He’s one of the guys in the industry that I will miss an awful lot. He’s one of the good guys, one of the people you can trust.”
