Exclusive Networks, a specialty distributor focusing on cybersecurity and cloud computing platforms, has appointed Scott Lewis to be its senior vice present of the Americas, while Christina Banker has been named vice present of North America sales.
Baker joins Exclusive from Fortinet, where he spent seven years leading its U.S. enterprise sales organization and recently its U.S. West sales teams. Banker previously held sales leadership roles at Oracle, Veeam, Fortinet, NetApp and VMware. She is responsible for vendor recruitment, inside and field sales, and the PC and server business at Exclusive Networks.
The immediate goal is to help partners sell larger solutions by adding more offerings to existing solutions, says Banker.
“We want to leverage up and go deeper,” says Banker.
The more products and services that partners can include in a solution the more profitable they tend to be, notes Banker.
Exclusive Networks is also looking to work more closely with managed service providers (MSPs) that build solutions on behalf of customers, adds Banker. In some cases, that means building a customer platform. In other cases, it means reselling a white-label service that complements their existing services, adds Banker.
Naturally, competition across the IT distribution sector remains fierce. Banker says that by being small and nimble Exclusive Networks is in a better position to work with partners to identify training opportunities that will specifically benefit any given partner.
It’s hard to say to what degree channel partners today value specialty distributors. However, in the case of cybersecurity especially it is clear partners need all the help they can get. IT organizations are now rapidly adopting an array of cybersecurity technologies that go well beyond firewalls and anti-virus software that most partners already know how to deploy and manage. The challenge now is figuring out what to layer on top of those core cybersecurity technologies at a price point the end customer can still afford.
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