The 2016 CRN Channel Chiefs

2016 CRN Channel Chiefs

Channel's change agents

The CRN team have spent the past month collating a list of 100 channel leaders working in Australia today (including a handful of country managers who also take an active role in partner enablement and strategy).

Click right (or swipe on mobile) to navigate through the slideshow. You can find the full list here.

Acronis

Rose Old

Old joined the Swiss data protection vendor to run the Australia & New Zealand channel in early 2014 after a career that spanned Veeam, Ingram Micro and Express Data.

Acronis’ top partner level is platinum, and entry to this coveted club requires partners to have competencies across three areas: cloud; backup and disaster recovery; and mobility and access connect.

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Adobe

Brent Irwin

Irwin stepped up to the top channel role in early 2015 after a decade with Adobe. His two predecessors at the company are both members of the 2016 CRN Channel Chiefs: Schneider’s Muralee Kanagaratnam and NextDC’s Steve Martin.

Irwin says: “My role is to lead the team that helps Adobe partners migrate, renew and grow our ever- growing base of cloud-subscription customers.”

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Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

Chris Downes

ALE recently announced a “revolutionary” model for networking hardware: an opex, pay-per-use approach. This should help Downes hit targets in the coming year.

“In 2016-17, we are increasing our channel coverage across SMB and enterprise. We are recruiting MSPs to take our new consumption-based communications and networking infrastructure services to market,” he says.

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APC by Schneider Electric

Muralee Kanagaratnam

Past Adobe channel chief Kanagaratnam joined the critical infrastructure vendor early in 2015. The company reshuffled its distributors in 2016 and also announced award wins by its top partners, which include Data#3, Dicker Data and Powerfirm.

Kanagaratnam says: “Our strategy is channel first and it is a significant percentage of our overall business in Pacific.”

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Apple

Richard Wylie

Despite the huge popularity of Apple technology among consumer and business customers alike, the company is still widely known for keeping the channel at arm’s length.

Case in point: despite nearly 20 years with Apple and five years leading its Australian channel, Wylie is a lesser-known figure in the Australia channel scene than the channel chiefs of many equivalent tier-one hardware vendors.

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Aruba

David Elliott

Elliott brought impressive channel cred to the wireless vendor when he joined in May 2014: he has also held leadership roles at Avaya, McAfee, EMC and Nortel.

Now he is part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise following its 2015 acquisition. “In November 2016, HPE Aruba will launch an entirely new partner program focused on rewarding partners for investing in skills,” says Elliott.

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Autodesk

Clare Wharrier

Wharrier has had a distinguished career at the 3D design and engineering software company. She joined in 2004 after a stint at CSC and has remained steadfast in channel roles since then, being appointed to her current role in 2015.

In June 2016, Dicker Data becomes the first Autodesk distributor in Australia to offer Autodesk products via a subscription model.

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Autotask

Adam Ross

Ross has been with the managed service software vendor since 2011, first in London and now in Sydney.

He tells CRN: “We believe in transforming business process through the use of operational technology and business intelligence, enabling organisations to execute with greater effectiveness, profitability while keeping an acute focus on end-user experience.”

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Avaya

Peter Chidiac

Chidiac took over the top job at Avaya in August 2016 after several years of personnel changes across the collaboration vendor’s Australian leadership and partner team.

“Avaya has undergone a major transition, and our goal is to work closely with our partners to enable them to help their own customers achieve digital transformation as well,” says Chidiac.

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AWS

Stefan Jansen

Since taking over the senior partner role at Amazon Web Services in April, Jansen has set about bolstering its channel base across myriad types of companies, from its traditional base in startups to major players such as Datacom, Deloitte and PwC.

AWS partners support “two major cloud adoption trends” among customers, says Jansen – migrations and “highly innovative solutions” built on the cloud.

“To support our customers, AWS will continue to invest in consulting partners who will have the capability to offer migration and managed services, as well as solution development services.”

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Belkin

Damian Commane

Commane brought experience spanning a host of unified communication and IT services companies when he joined Belkin in November 2014 – a return to the company he left in 2008 when he joined Cisco as regional sales manager.

In 2013 Belkin acquired home networking vendor Linksys and has sought to reinvigorate the brand.

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BMC Software

Matt Lowe

Lowe joined BMC in 2012, coming across as part of the software automation vendor’s acquisition of Numara Software. BMC develops a range of products and is well‑known among managed services providers for its service management and IT operations software, particularly its flagship Remedy IT management suite.

The vendor, whose Australian headquarters is in Sydney, employs about 6000 staff globally. Local partners include the likes of Redcore, which was recently acquired by Accenture.

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Brocade

Paul Barge

Barge stepped into the channel chief role at networking infrastructure vendor Brocade after a career that included stints at NEC, Cisco and Red Hat in Australia, as well as about 15 years at Microsoft in his native UK.

“The strength of our program is that we have a very close relationship with each of our partners,” he says. “We offer a lot of enablement.”

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Brother International

Julie Woodward

Woodward has a key role in helping the printer manufacturer expand beyond the consumer space and branch out into Australian business sales.

Brother launched its first commercial channel program in March 2016, along with a new range of gear. “I am very confident the implementation of our new channel focus will ensure a successful year for Brother,” she says.

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CA Technologies

Kevin Van Gils

CA Technologies has sought to reinvent itself and part of that includes significant partner recruitment ambitions led by Van Gils’ team.

Its channel is “definitely growing”, says Van Gils, who has been with CA since 2010. “CA continues to embrace and empower our partners and in the year ahead there will be new content and tools to fuel growth across the ecosystem.”

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Check Point

Craig McGregor

McGregor boasts a particularly rich channel resumé, having also led channel teams at Symantec, Adobe, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

“Check Point has a very well established and loyal partner ecosystem in Australia and our intent is to continue to work towards making that a profitable and rewarding experience for our partners,” says McGregor.

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Cisco

Jason Brouwers

Brouwers leads the partner strategy for one of the IT channel’s most important vendors. Cisco is traditionally seen as second only to Microsoft and – before its separation – HP in terms of number of resellers. Having worked for the networking giant since 2000, Brouwers took leadership of the partner business group in 2013.

Brouwers wants to foster partner-to-partner connections, telling CRN in 2014 that “even some of the most embryonic small partner relationships we have are extremely exciting, because that could represent an opportunity for one of our large, important partners”.

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Citrix

Belinda Jurisic

It has been a year of major channel changes for Citrix, including adding new training regimes and certifications, launching a new rewards program and helping partners forge joint opportunities with Microsoft.

Jurisic says she is “committed to advancing the role of women in IT – including the channel – and how the sector can become a more attractive career option for younger women”.

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Commvault

Mark Velthuis

Velthuis has been shaking things up since joining the backup and disaster recovery vendor in January.

“The fact that the product is number one allows me to work on the things that are broken and need to be fixed. Knowing there was a strategy and that we had all the ingredients to be successful made me decide to join,” he says.

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Concur Technologies

Murray Warner

Warner is dedicated to growing Australian sales of SAP-owned Concur and believes expansion will come through the channel. “Concur is at an inflection point in ANZ where our growth and scale need to outperform our ability to hire internally.

"We have the opportunity to accelerate growth through new partner models. This journey has seen revenue roughly doubling year on year.”

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CyberPower Systems

Shannon Dowden

Dowden focuses on the UPS vendor’s distributors as well as its NSW and ACT channel and wants to grow sales in this region by a minimum of 50 percent.

“My biggest achievement this year has been launching the CyberPower Champions Club Incentive. This is an internal distribution campaign that rewards our top achievers with a trip to Thailand in 2017.”

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Datto

James Bergl

Bergl was the first Australian employee of backup and disaster recover vendor Datto when it landed in-country in 2015, and Datto has since brought on more than 100 transacting partners.

Bergl says: “Our goal is to grow market share by bringing on newly trans­acting MSPs that quickly identify the cost-savings and additional revenue opportunities selling Datto can deliver.”

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Dell EMC

Mark Fioretto

It’s a time of great change for the teams at this newly combined vendor. Dell and EMC will continue to maintain separate deal registration and partner programs for 2016. From 1 February 2017 they will move to a unified partner and deal registration program.

Until then, the job of managing the vast partner community and extensive range – which includes everything from notebooks to heavy-duty enterprise storage – falls to Fioretto and Wright.

Fioretto is ascending to the position of enterprise lead for Australia and New Zealand – essentially, the role that was previously EMC country manager.

Things have been moving fast since the deal closed on 7 September and, with many roles still being worked out, there’s always a chance we’ll see further changes as things progress.

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Dell EMC

Geoff Wright

It’s a time of great change for the teams at this newly combined vendor. Dell and EMC will continue to maintain separate deal registration and partner programs for 2016. From 1 February 2017 they will move to a unified partner and deal registration program.

Wright continues to play a fundamental role in steering famously direct Dell towards the Australian channel, which he has done since joining in April 2015.

Things have been moving fast since the deal closed on 7 September and, with many roles still being worked out, there’s always a chance we’ll see further changes as things progress.

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Dropbox

Greg Kieser

It has been a year of partnerships for the ubiquitous cloud storage vendor. “2016 is the year we moved all our partners to Ingram Micro and the cloud marketplace,” says Kieser, who joined in March.

The company also exhibited at the Microsoft Australia Partner Conference in September.

“Our channel business is growing quickly. We want partners at the heart of every deal.”

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Eaton

Gordon Makryllos

As well as running Australia, channel stalwart Makryllos oversees a team of three managers who look after different channel segments.

“Our investments are in our channel partners, not in self-promotion ,” he says.

“We put the money in our partners’ pockets.” The percentage of Australian sales via resellers “is growing because the channel partner model is the most efficient”.

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Emerson Network Power

Mo Kandeel

Kandeel joined the critical infrastructure vendor in 2015 after a career that included Lexmark, Dell, Targus and Acer.

“My goal is to drive 60 percent of the ANZ revenue via our channel through incremental growth created by hybrid data centre adoption,” he says. “We are also working closely with complimentary vendors as alliance partners.

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Equinix

Glen Hastings

Never have data centres been so important to the channel as more resellers transition to a managed service model. “Equinix enjoys a rich ecosystem of top service providers,” says Hastings. “Those service providers consult, design and deploy cloud and connectivity solutions, guiding customers through the cloud evolution whether it is public, private or hybrid.”

Hastings, who joined Equinix in January 2015, adds: “The ideal partner is any organisation that is involved in the design and implementation of a digital transformation, connectivity and cloud strategy”.

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ESET Software

Gerard Nunez

Slovakian security vendor ESET spent 2015 driving a massive awareness campaign aimed at the Australian channel, having parted ways with its long-time Australian agent in a bid to focus more attention on the country.

“ESET has rapidly made enormous progress with success in several industries and we are confident 2017 will be a notable year for the business,” says Nunez.

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Extreme Networks

Yvette McEnearney

Extreme Networks appointed a second distributor in 2016 to drive continued growth in Australia, with Wavelink joining Distribution Central.

“We are always looking at new ways to ensure our partners can make healthy profits and provide technology that solves customers’ challenges,” McEnearney says. “For instance, our cloud offering is a perfect fit for ANZ midmarket.”

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F5

Rodney Thorne

F5 boasts an “experienced group of long-term partners” in Australia and Thorne’s team will spend the year “investing and growing the services capability with targeted enablement activities such as classroom training, boot camps and technical certifications”.

He also aims to recruit specialist security partners to “sell our new subscription products and standalone offerings”.

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FireEye

Sean Kopelke

Security vendor FireEye has moved to 100 percent channel business, says Kopelke, who joined the company in April 2015 after a long career with Symantec.

Along with its global system integrator partners, “FireEye has recently started to build out offerings targeted at the midmarket, delivering technology scaled for midmarket organisations at a price point aimed at this segment.”

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Forcepoint

Phon Kounlavongsa

It has been a busy year for Forcepoint, after being born at the start of 2016 through the amalgamation of three companies: Websense, Raytheon Cyber Products and McAfee’s firewall business units.

“We’ve seen a lot of interest in our solutions and value proposition and my role is to further develop the Forcepoint partner community in ANZ,” says Kounlavongsa.

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Fortinet

Genevieve White

White is focused on expanding the security vendor’s Australian channel, which includes well-known partners such as Fujitsu, The Missing Link and CDM.

The company’s sales are 100 percent indirect. “I develop our channel strategy to underpin the wider regional plan and align objectives, which include growth and expansion of our channel ecosystem,” she says.

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Fuji Xerox Printers

David Borg

Borg has been a mainstay of Fuji Xerox’s channel for more than two decades, but that hasn’t stopped him from implementing new ideas and strategies for expansion.

“Our channel business in Australia has benefited from three years of stellar growth as a result of a very targeted recruit and develop program, despite the overall market opportunity contracting,” says Borg.

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Fujitsu

Bert Noah

Noah recently stepped into this role after the departure of Daniel Campbell, who returned to his native UK after four years with Fujitsu Australia.

Noah has been with the diversified product and services company since 2011 as part of an IT career spanning more than two decades. He was previously country manager at Fujitsu PC Australia, which had a channel-only model.

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Gigamon

Mark Spencer

Few channel chiefs can boast the security expertise of Spencer, who joined Gigamon in 2015 after a career in channel roles at the likes of Trend Micro, RSA, Websense and Symantec, as well as four years at Express Data in the late 1990s.

“Our business is growing rapidly and our model will remain 100 percent channel,” Spencer tells CRN.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Christopher Trevitt

One of the most significant moves in the channel chief community this year was Trevitt’s jump from enterprise storage leader EMC to run the partner community for Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

He inherited a partner base that includes many of the most successful infrastructure resellers in Australia at a time of great change for HPE and he is already receiving positive feedback from partners.

“Partnering is in HPE’s DNA,” he says. “It’s at the centre of everything we do. I see strong growth in the year ahead driven by a broad ecosystem of resellers, service providers, MSPs and ISVs.”

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Hitachi Data Systems

Phil Teague

For HDS, it has been all about moving closer to a channel model, Teague told us in April 2015. “I came here to rebuild our indirect partner business. I’ve made no bones about it and neither has my boss; we didn’t have a very functional channel then.”

Now, channel sales are growing – “partners are becoming increasingly important in delivering business-defined IT solutions”, he says.

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HP Australia

Chris Hewlett

Hewlett has worked with HP since 2000 and now leads a channel that is seeing renewed vigour as the PC and printing maker gets it mojo back after spinning off from enterprise side HPE.

“I’m extremely proud of the establishment of the partner advisory council, which I lead,” he says. “The council allows us to give a voice to partners, a forum to discuss the issues they face.”

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Huawei Technologies

Leo Lynch

Huawei has a major task in building its reputation outside its traditional footprint in telecommunications, and strengthening its ties with Australian IT resellers and managed service providers. The hugely experienced and naturally charismatic Lynch is the man to do it, bringing a CV stacked with positions at some of the IT industry’s longest-standing vendors.

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IBM

Rhody Burton

Few channel chiefs here have stature or variety of channel roles Burton has held. She led the channel strategy at a little-known vendor called VMware, then moved to SAP.

In her most recent role at Big Blue, she is tasked with renewing the partner base around cognitive technology: “We’re focused on enabling our partners to take advantage of the opportunities that emerge.”

Intel Australia

VR Rajkumar

For a company that has long been an ingredient inside the products of OEM partners, Intel has found itself needing to expand. For Raj’s team, this has meant identifying new categories – especially the internet of things – and verticals, such as retail, transport and smart buildings.

“Our channel partners are willing to take risks with new technologies and this is great to see,” he says.

Intel Security

Luke Power

For the company formerly known as McAfee, the future represent a return to the past as Intel spins off its security arm and prepares to bring back an old name.

Power has worked his way up the rungs of the channel career ladder from an 18-year-old selling in a PC store to working for some of the biggest operations in the enterprise IT world.

Interactive Intelligence

Michelle Marlan

Interactive Intelligence – which was acquired by rival Genesys for US$1.4 billion – recently refreshed its partner program around the PureCloud platform, launched last year, and has grown partner sales to about 40 percent of business.

“We’re in the final stages of development of a new in-app tool for our channel,” says Marlan.

Juniper Networks

Darrin Iatrou

Iatrou had only just stepped into Juniper’s channel chief role as CRN went to press, but he already has firm ideas about where he wants the organisation to go.

“This year Juniper will be redefining its top-tier channel partners into five new categories. They will allow us to address new partner types within the software, services and Xaas business models.”

Kaspersky Lab ANZ

Rebecca Nguyen

After four years heading up Kaspersky’s channel, Nguyen this year moved into a “blended role” that also oversees enterprise sales.

“My ambition is to encourage our new sales team to achieve greater channel growth,” she says. “As an example, our partner, Globalnet Solutions, won reseller of the year at Kaspersky’s recent annual partner conference showing more than 400 percent growth.”

Kemp Technologies

Luke Holland

2016 has been the year of the cloud for Kemp’s Australian business, having forged a distributor relationship with Rhipe that opens up a new community of MSPs for the application delivery controller vendor.

“With this partnership, we are able to reach a totally different market with cloud service providers,” says Holland.

Konica Minolta

Eric Holtsmark

A veteran of the print and document channel, Holtsmark is well versed in working with print resellers and managed print service providers.

“Our team is dedicated to supporting growth initiates and diversification in an ever-changing market. Respect and mutual goals are the foundation for our strong relationships with our channel partners. Their success is our success.”

Lenovo

Margrith Appleby

Appleby had worked for Lenovo’s key rival, HP – as well as DEC and Compaq – for three decades before departing in 2014. She joined Lenovo earlier this year.

“Lenovo is the only major technology company that can offer enterprises an end-to-end hardware portfolio of the industry’s best innovations, from PCs to mobile to servers and storage,” she says.

Lexmark International

Amin Kroll

As Lexmark undergoes a US$3.6 billion merger, Kroll says the printing machinery maker will continue to accelerate an already growing share of business done indirectly.

“Lexmark is growing and we are very excited about our future. We invite traditional and non-traditional dealers, system and IT integrators, or digital workflow providers to get in touch.”

LiveTiles

Owen Brandt

LiveTiles is one of the standout examples of a reseller building its own intellectual property and spinning it out into its own company.

The Microsoft alliance vendor started life in Melbourne under Sharepoint partner nSynergy and last year listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. Brandt joined in 2016 out of Sitecore, where he was most recently alliance director for Asia.

Megaport

Gavin Smithen

The need for access to flexible, fast connections to the public cloud has driven the success of Megaport, which was established by entrepreneur Bevan Slattery in 2013.

Smithen says: “Our direct integration with AWS and Azure sees us well placed to help our partners expand their services in this area as their clients use our network to access the cloud from multiple locations across ANZ.”

Microsoft

Philip Goldie

With more than 10,000 Australian partners, Goldie leads the local strategy for the world’s largest and deepest channel ecosystem. It is a channel undergoing rapid evolution.

As the most high-profile executive in Microsoft Australia’s 100-strong partner team, Goldie has responsibility for partner capacity, partner incentives, partner profitability and digital engagement.

MobileIron

Peter Athanasiou

The biggest Australian channel move by the mobile device management leader in recent times has been to streamline its distribution under Distribution Central, says Athanasiou, who runs the APJ channel with a strong focus on Australia.

“Our aim is to ensure our partners are fully engaged, empowered and focused to grow and thrive in this dynamic market.”

NCR Corporation

Shane Bedford

One of the world’s oldest companies, most of us engage with NCR ever day when we use a card in an ATM. Now NCR is expanding in the IT channel, signing a distributor deal with Synnex.

Bedford says: “After several introductions with partners across APAC, in particular south-east Asia and ANZ, we have found valuable connections and look forward to an exceptional 2017.”

NetApp

Neville James

NetApp’s local partners, which include many of the country’s most celebrated system integrators, have helped the vendor outpace the under-pressure storage market in Australia.

“Our partner community continues to contribute to growth ahead of the market as we have done in the past two years,” says James. NetApp is working toward a 100 percent indirect model, he adds.

Netgear

Domenic Torre

Predominantly known for its networking gear in the smaller end of town, Torre is looking to grow its partner community across the spectrum.

He’s looking for partners who can “deliver our portfolio of innovative networking products which includes storage, switching and wireless technologies, into small and mid-enterprise businesses”.

Netscout

Matt Foster

Foster joined Netscout earlier this year after a career oriented around the Australian networking and telecommunications space.

Massachusetts-based information security vendor Netscout centres on application and network performance management, and says it “invented the network performance monitoring space and the packet flow probe”.

NetSuite

Graeme Burt

When Burt joined midmarket-skewed ERP vendor NetSuite in mid-2015, he brought more than 25 years of experience at a who’s who of software vendors including BMC Software, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP and Trend Micro. 

At the time NetSuite’s APJ boss, Lee Thompson, said: “We are investing heavily in the channel in APJ to better support our partners in the region.”

NextDC

Steve Martin

Since joining from Adobe in 2014, Martin has led the co-location company’s shift to a full-blown channel model. Soon after his arrival NextDC launched its own partner program – a first for a co-lo, said Martin at the time.

“Opportunity registration programs are fairly common with software and hardware vendors, but it’s not something I have seen or heard of in the data centre space.

“NextDC operates a partner-centric, go-to-market model. NextDC partners with over 300 organisations that deploy their own infrastructure or which support their customers’ infrastructure via co-location offerings.”

Nimble Storage

Theo Hourmouzis

The flash storage vendor recently increased its partner power in Australia with the appointment of Cath Gentile as senior channel development manager out of Citrix.

Hourmouzis says: “Today 100 percent of our revenue is fulfilled through our channel. This is something our entire organisation believes in, from the executive team all the way to the field sales organisation.”

Nuance

Nathan Taylor

Speech recognition vendor Nuance, known for its Dragon range of consumer-facing software, expanded its local channel footprint late last year with the appointment of Dicker Data as distributor, which also helped the Australian distributor expand its software practice.

Taylor has worked for the company since July 2013.

Nutanix

Niall O’Gorman

Nutanix has been on a rapid growth path since launching in Australia in 2013 and now has two distributors, Avnet and Exclusive Networks.

“With the incredible customer adoption we’ve experienced, investment in our ANZ team, and strategic engagement with select partners, we aim to expand our business aggressively this year,” says O’Gorman.

Optus

James Gully

For ISPs, telcos and managed services providers looking for carriage from Australia’s No.2 telco, Gully is the guy to speak to.

“We are always looking for new partners who need access to mobile, data, IP and voice networks to serve customers based in Australia. Optus continues to invest in the network on a path of relentless improvement.”

Oracle

Paul Schlawe

Oracle is widely known as a predominantly direct organisation, with less than a third of its sales via the channel (although it has made several allusions to redressing this balance).

“Oracle is looking for partners who want a customer-centric approach to deliver the Oracle Cloud through our portfolio of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions,” says Schlawe.

Palo Alto Networks

Stephen Milthorpe

A major player in the network security arena, Palo Alto updated its NextWave channel program earlier this year to focus on “differentiation and specialisation, profitability and loyalty”.

Having already appointed new ANZ boss Simon Green in April, Milthorpe was fresh-faced to PAN as this issue went to press, having only joined from NetApp in September.

Pegasystems

Nick Vince

Pegasystems, which focuses on CRM and business process management software, held its first-ever Australian partner conference this year. Vince joined from SAP in 2014, after working at Salesforce.

“Pegasystems has a vibrant local partner community, which we engage with to further develop their Pega knowledge and skills,” he says.

Polycom

Mark Braxton

Braxton was asked to head up Polycom’s ANZ channel team in October 2014, having spent seven years with the unified communication vendor.

In April 2015 Polycom released its new program in the US, with the program launching in ANZ in 2016. “We’ve listened to our channel partners and met requirements in areas that were responsive to the channel.”

Progress

Trevor Rogers

Newly announced partner boss Rogers took the role at Progress in June 2016, bringing with him channel expertise at CA Technologies, Oracle and HP, most recently as software channel and alliance manager.

“Partners are an integral component to the future growth and success of Progress as we enable companies to transform their businesses,” says Rogers.

Pronto

Chad Gates

Gates stands out as the head of one of the few Australian-owned vendors on this year’s channel chiefs list.

Gates, who took over from long-time managing director David Jackman in July, says: “Our strong collaboration with our key channel partnerships in Australia and overseas has been integral to advancing and accelerating our growth opportunities.”

Quantum Corporation

Jon Tinberg

Storage vendor Quantum is 100 percent channel and committed to growing business with partners, Tinberg says. “Quantum continues to develop industry-leading storage solutions that provide the highest capacity at the lowest overall cost.

"We will continue to work with our partners to develop their skills in delivering the best workflow storage in ANZ.”.

Rackspace

Stevie Walsh

Walsh manages the relationships with Rackspace’s two major upstream partners, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The hosting and cloud infrastructure provider has undergone a significant change in recent years in the face of competition and now positions itself as a managed service provider offering “fanatical” support for the AWS and Azure hyper-scale clouds.

Red Hat

Colin Garro

Red Hat has been moving the dial of direct vs indirect business. Garro’s team has nudged channel sales from less than 30 percent four years ago to now approaching 50 percent.

“My focus has been to build a channel that helps Red Hat transition from what has historically been a direct business model to one where an increased amount of business transacts via the channel,” he says.

Riverbed Technology

Charles de Jesus

De Jesus recently made the move from a member of the NetApp channel team to leading the Australia and New Zealand strategy for network optimisation vendor Riverbed, under new ANZ boss Keith Buckley.

“Partners with strong services offerings have an opportunity to capitalise on our strong market leadership and push into new market opportunities like SD WAN,” says de Jesus.

RSA

Jonathan Christopher

Now a subsidiary of the world’s largest tech company, Dell Technologies, RSA has “seen huge progress made with the ANZ channel community” in 2016, says Christopher.

“By aligning with RSA’s world-class solutions, partners that have deep domain expertise enable us to assist our customers in achieving their strategic objectives.”

Ruckus Wireless

David Fenner

Long-time Motorola and Zebra executive Fenner has joined as Brocade completes the integration of Ruckus Wireless.

“As two recognised disruptive brands, we are always looking for new partners that challenge the status quo and deliver solutions that create unique value propositions for enterprises and institutions,” he says.

Sage

Michael Williamson

A career at successful homegrown technology companies Empired and Pronto led Williamson to accounting software maker Sage in July 2015.

“FY2016 has been a period of strong growth for Sage in Australia and during the year ahead we will introduce a new partner program that will allow Sage to further develop its channel network to jointly reach revenue growth levels.”

SailPoint

Beth Ryan

Don’t let her accent fool you, American-born Ryan has worked in the Australian tech industry for more than 20 years, with 14 years at IBM and stints at CA Technologies and SAP, before joining identity management vendor SailPoint in April 2015.

Channel is in the company’s DNA, says Ryan. “In the coming year my primary objective is to increase SailPoint’s partner attach rate to 100 percent.”

SanDisk

Simon Williams

Significant change continues at SanDisk following its US$19 billion acquisition by storage giant Western Digital in October 2015. “SanDisk’s channel for SSD and PCIe flash has been through the server OEMs. It’s a great market,” says Williams.

“The channel will start seeing more exciting SanDisk branded solutions this year, particularly with the release of 3D NAND.”

SAP

Sumal Karu

While known mostly as a large-scale ERP provider with deep reach into government and enterprise, SAP has continued to push downwards into medium-sized customers – and that means channel.

It wants to move the needle from 70 percent to 100 percent indirect business in the midmarket, says Karu.

Seagate Technology

Mark Oh

Oh manages the LaCie and Seagate brands within this diverse storage multinational.

The flash storage maker recently underwent a rebrand and marketing push with the ‘Guardian’ series aimed at three different market segments: desktop and gaming, NAS and surveillance. Oh has been with the vendor for almost six years, having joined from Ingram Micro in 2011.

ShoreTel

Jamie Romanin

The communications sector has been disrupted over recent years by the arrival of cloud, including Microsoft Skype for Business.

Shoretel has responded with the launch of ShoreTel Connect, a platform that unifies on-premise and cloud. “We introduced a cloud UC service earlier this year with tremendous early traction and growth,” says Romanin.

Simplivity

Peter Hill

Simplivity has ridden the global hyper-converged wave with great success, and that includes Australian channel expansion.

“Locally we have seen steady growth in both partner recruitment with more than 50 signed partners in ANZ, as well as strong growth in sales in the region with close to 130 percent growth in bookings,” says Hill. “Our goal is to maintain a profitable channel.”

Solarwinds MSP

Kris Hansen

Change has been a fact of life for Hansen. First, GFI spun off its MSP management platform as LogicNow in 2014. Then, in June this year, the company was acquired by Solarwinds, which merged its remote monitoring business N-able with LogicNow.

“We focus on MSPs to provide easy-to-use and powerful cloud hosted tools to automate and enhance their offerings to customers.”

Sophos

Jon Fox

Fox is a familiar face to many of CRN’s readers after spending seven years at Ingram Micro, most recently as general manager of its advanced solutions group. He joined security vendor Sophos in July.

“We’re 100 percent channel first, so our success is completely tied to our partners’. I’m building a profitable, solid and structured partner model to drive mutual success,” says Fox.

StorageCraft

Marina Yelutas

StorageCraft – and its flagship product, ShadowProtect – are well-known among resellers. For the vendor, this year has been about driving a move to business continuity-as-a-service.

“Making the transition from a VAR to an MSP is not a small undertaking, so partnering with the right vendor will have a big influence on how successful a business may become,” she says.

Symantec

Tom Gower

Symantec separated from its information management side, Veritas, in 2015 and this year acquired Blue Coat. Gower stepped into the channel chief role in April 2016, having spent the previous three years as the head of Symantec’s APJ service provider channel.

He says the Blue Coat deal creates “an opportunity to enhance our cybersecurity pedigree”.

Tableau

Sean Guillemot

Business intelligence vendor Tableau counts highly specialised providers MIP Australia and RXP as some of its closet partners. Guillemot says Tableau’s “global channel strategy is to help people in new markets and industries see and understand their data.

"We continue growing our channel ecosystem to help organisations foster a data-driven analytical culture.”

Telstra

Charlotte Schraa

Australia’s largest carrier treads the line between channel-centric vendor and ICT services provider. Telstra has long had a channel play in the telco space, selling voice and data via Telstra dealers and phone shops.

Over the past two years, it has made a concerted effort to increase its relevance to IT solution providers in the field that it dubs ‘network applications and services’ (NAS).

Schraa, who was appointed channel chief in September, says the team’s biggest achievement has been launching an accreditation program. “We want to double channel sales within four years.”

Tenable Network Security

Peter Raven

Raven moved across from Samsung in June, and tells CRN that “this is an important time for Tenable as we increase our focus on addressing the evolving security needs of organisations in Australia and New Zealand”.

“The relationship between resellers and security vendors is critical in ensuring customers are equipped with the right security tools that meet their unique needs.”

TPG

Kyle Bunting

Bunting joined TPG in 2015 after more than a decade at Dell. The publicly listed telecommunication provider has spent that past few years gobbling up smaller ISPs to become on of the largest players in Australia.

In its first fiscal year since the iiNet deal, TPG recorded a 69 percent boost in net profit to almost $380 million and total underlying EBITDA of $775.3 million.

Unify

Luke Taylor

Unify expanded its distribution roster last year, adding Distribution Central to long-standing partner CommsPlus.

Since landing the role in June 2015, Taylor says: “My biggest achievement is onboarding and launching our cloud voice solution Open Scape Voice as a wholesale model through our platinum cloud partner, CloudWave.”

Veeam

Don Williams

The backup and DR vendor has had a change of partner personnel as CRN went to press, with well-known executive Peter Bender stepping into the alliances team.

For the time being Williams has taken responsibility for the Australian channel. “I want to continue to accelerate the cloud business and sustain growth in the enterprise segment of Veeam,” he says.

Veritas Technologies

Janet Docherty

Docherty brings weighty experience to the storage and backup vendor. Her resumé includes years of experience at each tier of the channel, including Symantec, Data#3 and distributor Tech Pacific.

“We’re actively growing our channel with a focus on high-value add and technically capable partners that live and breath a particular specialisation,” she says.

Verizon

Sharmilla Gosai

As the US-owned carrier’s first channel manager in Australia, Gosai brought years of experience with Microsoft and IBM when she joined in April 2016.

Speaking to CRN after the appointment, she said: “We are exploring local partnerships with resellers, systems integrators and value-added resellers to broaden our solutions and reach in the market.”

VMware

Kerrie-Anne Turner

Turner had big shoes to fill when she joined the software-defined vendor in February, replacing well-known channel identity John Donovan.

Now that she has her feet under the desk, she tells CRN her ambitions for the year ahead centre on “proactive, purposeful and predictable engagement with our partners, underpinned by delivering next-generation technologies and go-to-market models that deliver reinvention for their business and allow our partners to deliver technology innovation and transformation for their customers.”

Vocus Communications

Dan Whitford

Earlier this year Vocus opened its partner program to all Australian states for the first time (the program has been running in its home state of Western Australia for six years).

Whitford says the company’s two main goals are “to become the world’s most-loved telco and to be one of the top 10 best places to work. We believe we have an ethos that sets us aside from your average telco.”

Xirrus Wi-Fi Networks

Phil Tarbox

Tarbox, who has been with the company since 2012, says: “Xirrus sees the market going in two directions and has partner programs for each.

"MSPs are using Xirrus Command Center to remotely configure and monitor multiple customer networks from a single pane of glass.” Meanwhile, Xirrus EasyPass is an opportunity for “traditional resellers”.

Yellowfin

Luke Knowles

Another homegrown success story, Yellowfin is a global business intelligence vendor with its headquarters in Melbourne. “We are growing fast and the partner channel manager role is a new one,” Knowles says.

“I am looking for partners that know business intelligence and how to talk to companies about decision-making processes around their data.”