D-Link made it official today that Nick Tidd will be their new North American leader. As reported first in CDN, Tidd has been promoted to president of D-Link North America, reporting to Tony Tsao, the company CEO based in Taiwan.
This promotion has had a ripple-effect in many departments inside D-Link, both in Canada and the U.S. office based in Fountain Valley, Calif. Mark Ciprietti, former Insight Canada VP will take over from Tidd as the D-Link Canada’s new vice-president and general manager of business solutions sales.
Tidd also said that he has given up his channel chief role to Michael Fox. Both Fox and he are currently putting the finishing touches to a new channel program slated for March.
Also new to the channel team will be Terry Sedgley-West, a former Symantec and Alternative Technology VP. She will be D-Link’s new field marketing manager. Former Gateway and CompTIA VP Phyllis McCullagh is D-Link’s new vice-president of sales operations. Tidd reveals that McCullagh will be assisting him on a massive overhauling of D-Link’s partner infrastructure that will see the networking vendor have a Salesforce.com portal for its channel partners going forward. “This portal will be the underpinning of our new partner program,” Tidd said.
Tidd described his new opportunity as “mind boggling.” His first priority as D-Link president will be to leverage the company’s consumer leadership into the enterprise. The new channel partner program that will be announced in March will be a linchpin of this strategy along with building an enterprise sales team.
“This opportunity is remarkable. D-Link as a brand is well known with consumers. We have to effectively expand that portfolio to the enterprise and carrier markets. When customers see our portfolio they are taken aback by the depth and breadth of the products we have,” he said.
Tidd’s philosophy for his new role will be to run an established company as a start-up. He believes this strategy will help D-Link to expand into those two markets.
Tidd does see more of an opportunity for D-Link success in the enterprise and carrier markets today than in the past. “There is a hole to fill from Nortel’s departure in the market place. Networking has changed in the last 12 months with Avaya’s acquisition of Nortel, but they are still focused on voice with network architecture. A lot of people are underestimating the duplication with HP and 3Com products especially in the data centre. The aggregation point of the network and upgrades is a key position in our strategy and I see nothing but opportunity for us. The economy has also brought a new mindset to the market. Customers are forced to evaluate purchases and look to see value for the money. And, at our price points we are extremely aggressive and we have an open architecture strategy which is in our favour because customers will not be forced into a proprietary solution,” he said.
Channel partner acquisition will also be important to any success D-Link might envision in the enterprise space. Tidd, however, does not see channel recruitment just coming from disgruntled Nortel partners.
“The partner population is still evaluating the HP/3Com acquisition and Cisco as well. D-Link can compliment any networking solution with our strong presence in IP surveillance and wireless and that is something that is not being offered by our competitors. We have several targets for channel recruitment, not just one,” Tidd added.
D-Link also named Patrick Piwowarczyk vice-president of U.S. Enterprise Sales and Michael Walsh becomes vice president of information technology for North America for the company.