F5 Networks names Kaaren Lewis as new channel chief for ANZ

F5 Networks has appointed Kaaren Lewis as director of channel sales for Australia and New Zealand.

The executive joins the company following the departure of channel chief Rodney Thorne in October after a year in the role. Thorne has since taken up the role of director of Asia-Pacific channels for cybersec vendor Cybereason.

F5 Networks also welcomes Jade Meara to its ANZ leadership team in the position of head of marketing.

“We are proud to have Kaaren and Jade onboard to help drive growth in ANZ through their strong technology and leadership expertise,” ANZ managing director Jason Baden said.

“As organisations are moving into increasingly multi-cloud environments, our go-to-market approach needs to adapt to the new ways customers consume technologies today, and cater to their security and application service needs for tomorrow. Kaaren and Jade will be vital in helping F5 on this journey towards providing secure, flexible and easily consumable application services.”

Lewis’ previous role was as channel director for Commvault, which she exited in July after about a year in the position.

Prior to Commvault, Lewis was general manager of sales at Canon Australia for just six months, and before that was director of channel, SMB and alliances for HPE from 2014 to 2016. She also spent five years working in different director roles at Dell.

“For the ANZ channel, moving to an application-first era means the need to develop new business models, provide new security expertise, and overall be able to deliver the right solutions and frameworks to build and deliver apps that are faster, smarter and safer,” Lewis said of her appointment to F5.

“2019 is going to be a big year for F5 and my focus will be on helping the ANZ channel community share this potential for growth.”

F5's former channel chief Thorne joined F5 in 2014 as regional sales manager for commercial and partners in ANZ, before taking on the channel director role in October 2017.

Prior to F5, he worked for Motorola for eight years, most recently as general manager of ANZ enterprise channels. He was also a business manager at Ingram Micro.

As part of CRN's Channel Chiefs feature this year, Thorne told CRN that sales of hardware and perpetual licensing, subscription and cloud had been particularly pleasing over the past 12 months, and that there would be more opportunities in the future for consulting and services.