CA Technologies has appointed its former chief technology officer in Australia as senior director, partners, ANZ. Carl Terrantroy has been acting in the role for three months and in that time has taken early soundings from the company's channel partners.
He readily acknowledges that in the past CA was not always viewed as the most channel focused outfit. Luckily Terrantroy brings the benefit of previous experience working with partners, "although not at CA, and you would have to go back a bit in time," he joked.
According to Terrantroy, " CA has been known rightly or wrongly as a more direct organisation than a channel organisation and that is an area where the partners need reassurance that we are very serious about growing the partner business."
"In fact it is key across our business."
CA Technologies had its sales kick off two weeks ago, said Terrantroy, "Partners were interwoven throughout every compartment of that kickoff."
"So for me the very first issue is giving partners the confidence that we are serious about engaging them. We have been successful in some market segments such as managed service providers, " he said, "And we need to become more successful around those traditional systems integration and reseller segments."
"A lot of them have been selling complex solutions from competitors. They are looking at CA now, they are keen to partner with us and they're quite excited about the direction CA is taking."
In particular he emphasised the need to help re-skill the partners. "It's not a matter of taking one big service desk from a competitor and then selling the CA service desk instead."
There is no real value in that for either the partner or the customer, said Terrantroy.
"It's really about having the confidence to look at new solutions and to go and talk to customers about areas where they might not have even considered they could get improvements in the past."
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