**Editor’s Note: Click here to see which channel people were on the move in February or here for our most recent recap of big channel-impacting merger and acquisition news.**

Comtrade Software has declared operational independence from Comtrade Group with a new name, HYCU, and has embarked on a global expansion.

Simon Taylor, who previously served as president of Comtrade Software and chief strategy officer of Comtrade Group, will lead HYCU’s global initiatives as CEO. HYCU’s flagship product is a purpose-built backup and recovery offering for Nutanix.

HYCU’s Scott Henderson

HYCU also has hired two key channel executives. Scott Henderson, former vice president/head of sales at Egnyte, has joined HYCU as vice president of sales for the Americas, charged with overseeing sales management, and executing and driving the company’s growth strategy. Junelle Swan, previously a channel executive at Quest Software (formerly Dell Software) and Citrix, has joined as vice president of channels, charged with driving key channel, partner and strategic distribution relationships.

Taylor tells Channel Partners HYCU is 100 percent channel and partner-focused, and that “translates to greater opportunity for our channel partners.”

“Fundamentally the rebrand is all about establishing a greater presence in the marketplace as a software company,” he said. “Second, the rebrand for our channel partners is about our focus. We will continue to be laser-focused on helping our partners and their customers grow their Nutanix environments by offering total data-protection coverage. We believe that Nutanix is the right platform to support the modern data center and we are thrilled to be the world’s only purpose-built backup and recovery vendor for Nutanix customers.”

HYCU continues to evaluate and assess its partner relationships and ways in which it can help make partners more successful as they align with its Nutanix selling efforts, Taylor said.

HYCU’s Junelle Swan

“For example, there are a number of new partner relationships we have established to specifically support interest in purpose-built data protection for Nutanix,” he said. “We started to do a number of custom events — for example, with ADN in Germany as well as TechData Advanced Solutions UK, and for our growing partner base in APAC. These are focused efforts to support their interest in moving to the enterprise cloud and the growing interest in our HYCU for Nutanix backup and recovery software solution.”

Comtrade Group, an IT company with more than $400 million in annual revenue, will continue to be the primary shareholder in HYCU.

Henderson said HYCU’s product reputation, both in functionality and reliability, is “amazing.”

“I’m excited to have the opportunity to increase HYCU’s focus on sales resource expansion and execution,” he said. “HYCU’s world-class data protection capabilities for hyperconverged platform infrastructure, combined with …

… an outstanding partnership with Nutanix, has all the ingredients for a disruptive force in the hyperconverged storage arena. I’m looking forward to scaling what is already an outstanding HYCU sales organization in the Americas, leveraging both the HYCU and Nutanix channel, to capitalize on this great market opportunity.”

Swan said she’s focused on “evaluating and assessing our existing partner program, and to look for ways to enhance it so it aligns with what our partners need in order to be successful in their own selling efforts.”

“We know so many of our partners are doing well with Nutanix, and we want to help them continue in those efforts as best (as) possible,” she said. “At the end of the day, for us, we want our efforts and the programs we develop to be both compelling and relevant to our partner community.”