David De Abreu is the new channel chief of Cisco Canada. The former services chief at the networking giant takes over from Mike Ansley who is now the vice president of business markets for the subsidiary.
Ansley was handling three areas for Cisco Canada, which prompted the shift in responsibilities. Ansley will now be running the enterprise group at the company.
During his time as channel chief Ansley was instrumental in implementing channel programs such as the EASE program or Enabling Architecture Sales Excellence and the Master Cloud Builder program. Ansley told CDN at the time that people resources are a huge challenge especially in going after small to mid-size business.
Related Story
What Ansley will be most known for is establishing the Partner Led business approach at Cisco Canada. Cisco at the time had a touch balancing act with partner and customer led directions. Under Ansley he put a strong emphasis on Partner Led starting in early 2012 and today many more channel partners are financially motivated to work with Cisco. What Ansley and the entire Cisco channel team did was remodel its approach to business with a focus on funding Partner-led activities so that solution providers can go it alone. He also promoted Rebecca Leach and put her in charge of the Partner-Led program so that it had a dedicated leader in Canada.
As for De Abreu, the Western graduate is the new vice president, partner organization for Cisco Canada and defacto channel chief. He will have total responsibilities for channel partners, distribution, and the small and medium-sized business segment in Canada.
De Abreu will also serve as vice president of solutions for Cisco Canada, where he is responsible for advanced technologies and architecture sales. This group includes national sales and engineering teams focused on unified communications, data centre, wireless, and security solutions.
De Abreu joined Cisco in 1999 and has over 25 years of national sales experience leading services, enterprise, commercial, SMB and service provider teams. Previously, De Abreu was vice president of services for Cisco Canada, responsible for driving the ongoing success of Cisco Services in the Canadian market.
Prior to joining Cisco, De Abreu was Vice President for Canadian Enterprise Sales at 3Com. He has also held various sales management and leadership positions with Bell Canada and NCR Canada.