September’s Channel People on the Move

Some big names headline our latest edition of people on the move — not only the companies making the new hires, but particularly the communications giants for whom they used to work.

TBI added former AT&T and Cisco managers. RapidScale tapped a Level 3 veteran. Former Avaya, Microsoft and Shaw Communications employees also were on the move, taking on important roles in the channel.

Our image gallery includes new channel managers and other sales leaders, from regional managers all the way up to CEOs. Some have a day-to-day impact on the channel, while others make decisions that affect partners more over the long haul.

This list is by no means comprehensive, but it gives you a nice sampling of the new hires and promotions in September. You’re sure to see people you know.

Missed last month’s “people” gallery? Click here to see who was on the move in August.

Follow senior online managing editor Craig Galbraith on Twitter.

RapidScale brought on a new man to manage the cloud provider’s relationship with Intelisys.

Andrew Davis (left) will serve as VP of partner experience for RapidScale, tasked with helping the company grow its market share in the Bay Area. Davis is responsible for RapidScale’s partnership with Intelisys — made even important with ScanSource’s plans to acquire the company. He also has experience at Level 3, West IP, Covad and more.

Read more about Davis’ new job.

Also new at RapidScale is Chris Moreira. Moreira is the company’s new channel manager, West region. His responsibilities include developing new partnerships, managing and leading existing partners, and building a winning partner experience approach.
      
Prior to joining RapidScale, Moreira was in the U.S. Marine Corps.

TBI, the Chicago-based master agent, hired two national channel managers to help grow the company’s agent community.

Texas-based Bill Vander Vennet (left) will lead the Southwest effort. He most recently worked as director of business development for CLEAResult and senior director for Acceller (later renamed Bridgevine). He also has five years of experience with AT&T, working for its national retail channel.

Gary Butler will hold a similar role in the Southeast. Butler is based in Atlanta and has experience with Jacada and Cisco.

Read more about TBI’s hirings.

Chris Downie (pictured) stepped into Peak 10’s CEO chair while David Jones, previous CEO and co-founder, began his transition to chairman of the company’s board of directors.

The appointment marked a “new stage of growth objectives for the company and will leverage its leading scale and long tenure of delivering trusted enterprise IT infrastructure and solutions,” Peak 10 said. Downie previously was CEO of Telx Holdings, the data-center services provider.

Read more about Downie.

Conferencing and collaboration giant Polycom will be led by Mary McDowell, its new CEO, one the company’s acquisition by Siris Capital Group is complete.

McDowell is a technology executive who has led global multibillion dollar businesses in the mobile, consumer and enterprise sectors. She is currently an Executive Partner at Siris Capital. She formerly was EVP, mobile phones at Nokia, where she held global P&L responsibility for the feature-phone business and associated software and digital services.

A cloud ERP provider on the Salesforce platform, FinancialForce appointed Chris Lee to vice president of strategic sales. In his new role, he is responsible for heading up the company’s enterprise and general business sales groups, and for maintaining successful customer relationships.

In his previous roles at DocuSign, Salesforce and Siebel Systems, Lee built enterprise sales teams. He created and grew DocuSign’s global financial-services vertical.

Read more about Lee here.

Line Systems (LSI), the integrated communications provider, added Jace Harris, formerly of Avaya, as a channel-partner manager based in Atlanta.

Harris will be responsible for supporting LSI’s existing master-agent relationships in the Southeast, most notably MicroCorp (Atlanta) and CNSG (Charlotte). He also will be tasked with increasing the number of active partners in that area of the country.

Harris previously was a territory channel account manager for Avaya based in Georgia.

Read more about Harris and Line Systems.

Unified storage provider Nexsan appointed Tony Craythorne to senior vice president of worldwide sales. He is responsible for driving sales growth, market expansion and global channel partnerships.

Most recently, Craythorne was senior vice president of worldwide sales at NexGen Storage, and led the company through a spinout from SanDisk through to its recent acquisition by Pivot3. Prior to NexGen, he held senior management positions at a number of storage companies including Brocade, Hitachi Data Systems, Bell Micro and Connected Data.

This is where to learn more about Craythorne and Nexsan.

Westcon-Comstor promoted Andrew Warren to executive vice president, North America, responsible for driving the company’s U.S. and Canadian operations.

Under Warren’s direction, the distributor’s security solutions practice grew from $275 million to more than $1 billion in sales and today represents more than half of Westcon-Comstor’s North American business. Prior to Westcon-Comstor, he spent six years at Avnet.

Carol Giles Neslund succeeds Warren as VP and general manager of the company’s security solutions practice.

Neslund’s executive and channel leadership roles with technology companies, including Avaya, Seagate Technology and others, include running billion-dollar businesses and “demonstrating a history of success within dynamic markets.”

Stratoscale, a cloud infrastructure company, appointed Jay Phillips to vice president of global sales. He will be responsible for further developing the company’s channel partner program and driving global customer acquisition.

Most recently, Phillips served as vice president of worldwide sales at AccelOps, where he worked closely with the acquisition and integration of AccelOps into Fortinet.

Get the full scoop on Phillips here.

Kelly Pritchard, formerly of Shaw Business, is the new national channel director for iTel Networks, the Canadian ISP.

In her new position, Pritchard is responsible for iTel’s overall channel strategy, development, sales and marketing. This includes supporting technology distributors and agents as they expand their businesses in Canada. Pritchard has 11 years of telecom industry experience, most recently as Shaw’s manager of national channel sales.

This is where to read more about Pritchard.

One of Microsoft’s top channel leaders left the company for Intermedia, but his relationship with the technology giant is only expected to grow.

Eric Martorano is Intermedia’s new VP of worldwide sales, after several years of working as general manager of U.S. partner sales for Microsoft.

Read our Q&A with Martorano about his future with Intermedia.

Tech distributor Avnet removed the “interim” from Bill Amelio’s title of CEO, a position he’s held since July 11.

Amelio has spent most of his career in senior roles managing global technology enterprises and publicly traded companies, bringing more than 35 years of management and industry experience to Avnet.

Just two weeks after Amelio’s appointment, Tech Data said it would buy Avnet’s IT business for $2.6 billion.

Channel veteran Jonathan White, previously with Trend Micro and Microsoft, is NetEnrich’s new vice president of channel marketing and sales.

White has more than 20 years of senior channel marketing and management experience, most recently as director of SMB channel marketing at Trend Micro, where he grew MSP revenues by 25 percent. He also spent 12 years at Microsoft working in various field and channel marketing roles across the company’s mobile, business applications and cloud technology portfolio.

Learn more about White here.

Broadvoice has a new channel manager in the Midwest.

It’s Ryan Ficken, who joined the UC and cloud PBX services provider to help its sales partners with technology selection, customer service and solution design. He appears new to the indirect sales channel but holds more than 18 years of experience in sales and operations leadership at various companies.

Here‘s where to learn more about Ficken’s role at Broadvoice.

SADA Systems, the IT and cloud computing provider, hired Tom Marek as practice director for its Enterprise Solutions Team.

Marek brings 20-plus years of experience customizing and implementing Microsoft business products across cloud, analytics, IoT and integration for Fortune 500 customers. At SADA, he will work on projects encompassing custom development, information management and data analytics, focusing on Microsoft Azure, Cortana Intelligence Suite, IoT Suite, SharePoint, Power BI and Office 365.