Diversified’s Leadership Change – Whose the New CEO, Paul Lidsky?

November 25, 2025 by guest author, Antonia Hamberger

When Diversified announced that board chairman Paul Lidsky would step into the CEO role, industry watchers immediately wondered what happened to the former CEO Eric Hutto – whose name was left out in the announcement.

Eric Hutto had become CEO after founder Fred D’Alessandro stepped back in 2022 and had been tasked with sharpening Diversified’s focus on IT-driven growth. We asked the new CEO Paul Lidsky what the sudden change in leadership signalled. His answer: Diversified isn’t shifting course – just shifting gears.

Lidsky joined Diversified’s board in 2023, recruited for his deep experience leading IT solutions and services organizations, including Core BTS and Datalink. He describes his move into the top job as a “natural progression,” pointing to a career spent guiding tech companies through scale, transformation, and rapid change. According to Lidsky, Hutto had simply reached the planned end of his tenure and signaled he was ready for his next chapter. The board chose Lidsky to steer the company’s next phase.

Lidsky’s roadmap zeros in on three core markets where Diversified can deliver fully integrated solutions: digital signage and experience; enterprise workplace and collaboration; and broadcast AV and media production.

What Lidsky sees as Diversified’s real differentiator is its ability to operate across all three. “We’re not approaching AV as a standalone discipline,” he says. As AV, cloud, networking, cybersecurity, and data increasingly live on the same enterprise backbone, he argues, the industry must think in terms of unified environments – not silos. “For many organizations, these environments are now inseparable.”

With IT teams now often responsible for AV infrastructure, expectations have changed. Systems must meet IT-level standards for governance, reliability, and scalability. While AV-IT convergence is well underway, Lidsky believes the industry is still in mid-transition, with major gains to be made in making systems easier to deploy, manage, and support at global scale.

Lidsky steps in as Diversified is expanding its global footprint. The company recently opened a German office to serve as its EMEA operational hub and expanded its India team to strengthen its follow-the-sun delivery model. Lidsky stresses that these moves weren’t simply geographic milestones – they’re meant to match the demands of global clients.

With more than $1 billion in annual revenue, roughly 3,000 projects delivered each year, and 70 Fortune 100 clients, Diversified is already operating at a scale hardly any AV-focused integrator can match. Lidsky’s mission now is to build deeper relationships with its existing clients and deliver consistent managed services wherever they operate.