Blake Wetzel No Longer Rackspace's Channel Chief

Blake Wetzel has parted ways with Rackspace about a year after becoming the managed cloud company’s channel chief.

Blake Wetzel

Wetzel, a member of the Channel Partners Circle of Excellence, confirmed that he no longer is working for Rackspace.

“I am excited about the opportunities in the IT market for channels with continued evolution of business outcomes for enterprises,” Wetzel told us. “With continued expansion of IoT, analytics, UCaaS and multiple communication methods to customers, the channel has an incredible opportunity in front of it. I soon hope to be helping another service provider in developing and executing on their channel strategy.”

He didn’t elaborate further on why he left Rackspace. The company only told us that it will announce the new head of its channel program “in the coming weeks.”

On his LinkedIn page, Wetzel calls himself an “experienced leader in search of (his) next adventure.”

Wetzel, known for years in the telecom channel as vice president of the CenturyLink Channel Alliance, left the telco last spring to become Rackspace’s channel chief. Prior to his tenure at CenturyLink, he held numerous positions with Qwest Communications before it merged with CenturyLink in April 2011.

Last September, Wetzel talked to Channel Partners about Rackspace’s channel strategy undergoing a substantial makeover. The new channel strategy included five go-to-market pillars with five different segments of partners. The five pillars included: global and regional SIs; technology go-to-market partners, such as OEMs, software and cloud companies; agents; VARs and distributors; and ISVs.

“What we wanted to do is be very proactive and prescriptive about the types of partners we are going after and developing a depth of expertise around specific practice areas where we felt there’s a great intersection between the migration of cloud technologies to these types of communities of partners,” he said at the time.

Last August, Rackspace agreed to a $4.3 billion buyout offer from Apollo Global, which took the company private.