Pivot3's New Global Sales Chief Has Big Plans for the Channel

Rance Poehler, the new vice president of global sales and chief revenue officer at Pivot3, the hyperconverged infrastructure vendor, brings a heap of experience from Dell and Panasonic to his new job.

Pivot3’s Rance Poehler

As a 25-year veteran of IT and the channel, Poehler spent the last two years heading Dell’s virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) organization and the previous 23 years at Panasonic where he served as president of various divisions and in several other roles.

“I have a deep belief in the power and the promise of the channel,” Poehler told Channel Futures. “I have a long history of working well with the channel. I am going to bring those relationships to Pivot3.”

Poehler says channel partners will continue to play a crucial role in helping Pivot3 scale and deliver its HCI products and services to customers. At Pivot3, he will be responsible for leading the company’s global sales organization and executing on its growth strategy and talent acquisition.

At Dell, Poehler served as vice president of worldwide sales for its cloud client computing team, an $800 million line of business that includes a wide range of cloud and desktop virtualization products. As president of the Panasonic System Communications Co., he led a $1.1 billion business-to-business North American division, which included integrated internet-of-things (IoT) products aimed at Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies. He also previously worked for Toshiba and IBM, where he held progressively senior roles selling into corporate data centers.

Pivot3, which has been in business for more than 10 years, offers HCI as well as other services including hybrid cloud, VDI, data-center modernization, big-data analytics, video surveillance, smart cities and IoT management, as well as business continuity and disaster-recovery assistance.

Poehler said he heard about HCI while he was working at Dell and found its concepts and potential uses compelling for the IT industry.

“It’s something that greatly interested me,” he said, which led him to pursuing a job in the HCI marketplace.

HCI works to simplify traditional data centers by unifying storage, compute, networking and virtualization resources into a virtual infrastructure that can reduce costs, IT complexity and risk for businesses of all sizes. The flexibility of HCI means it can reside in a data center, in hybrid mode or in the cloud.

“Pivot3’s HCI can tie into legacy hardware and data centers and allow customers to use what they have and go into a hyperconverged environment,” said Poehler. “It’s not like legacy hardware, where you have storage and servers, they talk to each other and then you rip and replace them to make upgrades.”

Ron Nash, Pivot3’s CEO at Pivot3, said Poehler’s hiring is a boon for the company.

“Rance has extensive experience building and expanding medium- and large-scale B2B organizations while creating a culture that motivates team members to contribute to their potential,” said Nash. “He has consistently delivered margin and market-share growth in complex organizations. Rance knows our segments and our technology so he’ll have an immediate positive impact.”

Pivot3 works with more than 710 channel partners around the world, including distributors and multinational partners. The company’s major competitors include Dell EMC and Nutanix.

In December, Pivot3 announced the addition of new policy-based security features to its HCI platform.