The task for Eric Gales in his first full year as VMware Canada’s country manager was to transition the subsidiary from a segment of the U.S. sales arm to an independent business with a full Canadian engagement model.
“The organizational footprint we had was largely a function of our history,” said Gales. “Now that we have Canadian leadership we can start to tune it, and make smarter decisions about where we have resources allocated.”
Gales, a former Microsoft Canada, is accelerating the process by bringing new talent onboard. One key hire in October was former Cisco, Dell and Xerox executive Donna Whitmann as VMware Canada’s new channel chief. Gales told CDN he wanted to bring in someone who could make a quick impact.
“It was my view that we could not have hired someone better than Donna in terms of time to productivity. She would be the shortest of any of the candidates to productivity because she has instant credibility with VMware internally and the partners,” said Gales.
New talent has also been shaking up VMware’s global channel organization. Another Cisco veteran, Dave O’Callaghan, joined in May as global channel chief, and Frank Rauch came from HP to run the Americas partner business. They’re working on a program overhaul that could be ready for February’s Partner Exchange conference.
Driving the company into 2014 will be a focus on going deeper with its existing customer base, as it moves beyond data centre virtualization and into the network. VMware sees four major trends driving IT today – social, mobile, cloud and big data – all of which are putting pressure on existing infrastructure.
