Dell executive shake-up sees Greg Davis leave channel chief role

For the first time since Dell abandoned its direct ways and embraced the indirect channel, coinciding with a massive shift from PC vendor to cloud and data centre infrastructure player, Greg Davis will no longer be the face of Dell’s channel.

Davis, a familiar face to Canadians as the president of Dell Canada from 2005 to 2007, has been global channel chief for six years as vice-president and general manager of global commercial channels. In the role he worked to execute a massive organizational shift towards the channel, winning over skeptical partners to the point where the channel now accounts for 34 per cent of Dell commercial revenue.

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He will now have a new role, however. As part of the first major organizational shakeup at the vendor since it became a private company, Davis will become vice-president of software and peripherals. And Dell will have a new channel chief, with Cheryl Cook taking over as vice-president of global alliances and services. She was formerly Dell’s vice-president of enterprise solutions, and had responsibility for the channel at Sun Microsystems as senior vice-president of Americas sales.

In a letter to partners announcing the changes, Davis said they’re part of a wider restructuring that will see the channel organization integrated more tightly into Dell’s regional organizational structure, a move which should lead to greater coordination and cooperation between the direct and indirect sides of Dell’s business, and hopefully reduce channel conflict. For example, in Canada, the channel team will report into Dell Canada president Kevin Peesker as part of Dell’s Canada-first reorganization.

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“Our channel strategy and the global nature of our PartnerDirect program will stay the same. We will continue to focus on: winning in the data center, investing in training, being easy to do business with, and being your long-term partner,” said Davis. “And PartnerDirect will continue to enable the sale of end-to-end and point solutions through one simple, consistent program.”

And in other Dell executive news, Bill Rodrigues has been promoted to the role of president of Dell North America.

Author: Jeff Jedras

A veteran technology and business journalist, Jeff Jedras began his career in technology journalism in the late 1990s, covering the booming (and later busting) Ottawa technology sector for Silicon Valley North and the Ottawa Business Journal, as well as everything from municipal politics to real estate.He later covered the technology scene in Vancouver before joining IT World Canada in Toronto in 2005, covering enterprise IT for ComputerWorld Canada. He would go on to cover the channel as an assistant editor with CDN.His writing has appeared in the Vancouver Sun, the Ottawa Citizen and a wide range of industry trade publications.