Zerto Looks Inward for New VP of Americas Sales

As he starts his new job as Zerto’s vice president of Americas sales, Chris Nelson has a bit of a head start with some of his clients — he has already been working for the company as the vice president of sales for North America East for more than two years.

Nelson’s Thanksgiving week promotion came at the same time that Zerto promoted the VP of Americas sales he replaces, Coley Burke, to become the company’s newest chief revenue officer.

Zerto’s Chris Nelson

Nelson joined Zerto more than two years ago after working for Hitachi Data Systems for almost eight years as a global vice president and general manager for data analytics and data intelligence, and as a director of sales for the Northeast. He also previously worked as a director of sales and as a district sales manager at Quantum for almost seven years.

Jim Ortbals, Zerto’s vice president of worldwide channels and cloud sales, told Channel Futures that Nelson’s promotion comes as the company builds out its sales team to drive its business and revenue in the future.

“He’s a known entity, especially in the eastern U.S.,” Ortbals said of Nelson, who has been working with the company’s customers and partners since he joined Zerto. “We transact all our business through the channel. The fact is that a lot of partners in the east are very familiar with him. The continuity is going to be very good.”

Burke, now the data backup and disaster recovery company’s chief revenue officer, was Zerto’s vice president of Americas sales for nearly three years after coming to the company from Dell EMC, where he worked for almost 11 years in a variety of positions, including as director of primary storage sales and as the director of global sales for the core technologies storage division. Burke also previously worked in sales for Kashya, Quantum and IBM.

Both promotions show that Zerto is “continuing to invest in the channel with the right people and the right approaches,” said Ortbals.

Zerto’s Coley Burke

The promotions weren’t the only executive moves made by the company this year. In August, Zerto hired Eric Barnhart as its new director of channel sales for the Americas and Emily North Weeks as its director of sales for the Americas, East. Barnhart previously worked for Avnet Technology Solutions, Tech Data and other companies, while Weeks was a former Cisco sales manager with more than 20 years of channel sales experience. She also previously worked for Microsoft and Veaam.

Ortbals came to Zerto in late February as its new vice president of worldwide channels and cloud sales with the goals of helping grow the company’s combined channel partner and cloud businesses.

Earlier this year the company recently unveiled the latest version of its flagship disaster recovery and backup application, Zerto 7.0, and introduced new enterprise subscription-based licensing and services for customers.

Zerto’s flagship product is its IT Resilience Platform, an enterprise-grade platform which customers can use to replace multiple disaster and data protection applications and services. The platform combines Zerto disaster recovery, backup and cloud mobility services for users. The company’s partner network includes more than 1,800 VARs and systems integrators and more than 350 cloud service providers. Zerto says it has more than 6,000 customers around the world.