Internap Names Former Avaya Sales VP Channel Chief

**Editor’s Note: Click here to see which channel people were on the move in August.**

Internap is amping up its channel business with the appointment of Patricia Watkins as vice president of global channel sales.

Watkins comes to Internap from Avaya, where she served as vice president of sales. She also has held numerous sales and business development leadership roles at Hewlett-Packard, and sales management roles at AT&T, NCR and Teradata.

An Internet infrastructure provider, Internap has both a partner program, and a referral program for individuals or organizations that are not ready to become a reseller or agent, but would like to introduce its services to potential clients or peers.

At Internap, Watkins will focus on growing the company’s channel business by increasing partner productivity with new incentive programs and improved relationship management. Also, she will focus on expanding the range of partners to meet growing demand for the company’s service offerings.

“Companies across industries – from ad-tech to e-commerce and financial services – are increasingly relying on IT infrastructure to deliver the speed and reliability needed to support business-critical and data-intensive applications,” Watkins said. “With Internap’s full range of high-performance cloud, colocation and managed hosting solutions, we’re uniquely positioned to help our channel partners address this underserved customer demand.”

While 451 Research expects 25 percent of applications to be deployed in hybrid environments this year, organizations still are struggling to make sense of the “hybrid buzz” and how it applies to them, according to Internap. Watkins’ team will focus on helping channel partners understand and serve the growing hybrid opportunity by aligning customers’ application requirements with the infrastructure mix to optimize performance and costs – whether public, private or bare-metal cloud, colocation or managed hosting.

“Increasing sales with channel partners is a critical driver of Internap’s growth strategy,” said Michael Ruffolo, Internap’s president and CEO. “Patty’s proven track record of success building channel partner programs and developing long-term partner relationships will be critical to expanding this important route-to-market and ensuring partners have the right tools to attract and retain customers seeking high-performance infrastructure solutions.”

Internap will be at Cloud Partners, at booth #324.