Channel People on the Move: Intelisys, Avaya, RapidScale, More

Channel People on the Move: Intelisys, Avaya, RapidScale, More

February was a big month for Channel People on the Move.

So many people took new jobs or were promoted within the telecom and IT channels that we couldn’t list them all here. We whittled the list down to 15 new channel chiefs, channel managers, other executives and upper management who will make decisions critical to the futures of their organizations.

This edition of People on the Move includes new hires at master agents Intelisys and TBI – the latter particularly notable because she moved from one master to another – a pair of new channel chiefs at Avaya, and a new channel chief taking the reins at the newly combined Windstream-EarthLink.

None of those gets you excited? How about new hires and promotions at BullsEye Telecom, Cohesity and Rubrik? And that’s only about half of our list.

Click through and you will see people you know.

Missed last month’s “people” gallery? Click here to see who was on the move in January.

Follow executive editor @Craig_Galbraith on Twitter.

Channel People on the Move: Intelisys’ Justin Noller and Brandon Knight

Intelisys hired Justin Noller (left) as channel manager for its Northeast region. He will support Intelisys sales partners in New York and New Jersey.

Most recently, he worked for inContact, spending more than a year there as a channel manager in the Northeast. Prior to his tenure with inContact, he worked for Kingcom, one of Verizon’s largest platinum partners, as an enterprise channel manager.

Learn more about how Noller worked closely with Intelisys and its partners in his last positions.

Also new at Intelisys is Brandon Knight (right), who holds the title of cloud evangelist. The 27-year industry veteran will have multiple contacts with Intelisys sales partners in this new role, participating heavily in the development and delivery of Cloud Services University (iCSU) content.

Learn more about Knight and his new role here.

Channel People on the Move: RapidScale’s Duane Barnes and Dylan Bouterse

RapidScale promoted Duane Barnes (left) to the role of SVP, cloud engineering. He will oversee cloud-related activities such as engineering, architecture, support, solutions engineering and project management.

Barnes has been working at RapidScale since last year when he was hired as director of solutions engineering.

Click here to read more about Barnes.

New to RapidScale is Dylan Bouterse (right), who takes the role of senior solutions engineer. His role focuses on supporting the cloud provider’s partner network with pre-sales engineering support of its product portfolio. He recently worked for Windstream Hosted Solutions before TierPoint bought it.

Click here to read more about Bouterse.

Channel People on the Move: Windstream’s Olen Scott

Windstream named EarthLink’s Olen Scott as the combined company’s new channel chief just after the $1.1 billion merger closed on Feb. 27.

Scott, previously EarthLink’s vice president of partner channels, is now Windstream’s vice president of channel sales. Jason Dishon, Windstream’s former channel chief, has left the company to pursue other opportunities.

Scott will be responsible for designing, operating and supporting Windstream’s channel sales organization.

Read the full story here.

Channel People on the Move: TBI’s Vanessa Byrd

TBI, the Chicago-based master, brought on Vanessa Byrd to oversee agent partner relationships in the southeastern U.S.

Byrd will serve as a national channel manager for TBI after spending the last five years at Telarus. She most recently was regional vice president for Telarus’ mid-Atlantic region and previously worked as a partner relationship manager for the master agent.

Read more about why Byrd traded master agents here.

Channel People on the Move: Aryaka’s Nick Fan

SD-WAN provider Aryaka appointed Nick Fan, formerly with Masergy, as vice president and general manager of Americas.

In his new role, Fan will lead sales and channel functions for Aryaka in the Americas. With more than 15 years of experience, Fan joins Aryaka as it is “aggressively expanding its market footprint as a leader in the global SD-WAN space,” the company said.

The full scoop on Fan is here.

Channel People on the Move: Rubrik’s Mark Smith

Rubrik, the cloud data-management company, announced the appointment of Mark Smith as executive vice president of global sales and business development.

He previously was Arista Networks’ senior vice president of worldwide sales and business development, and has more than 25 years of experience building global sales, marketing and business development teams. During his four years with Arista, that company’s revenue grew from $200 million to more than $1 billion.

Click here to read more about Rubrik and Smith.

Channel People on the Move: BullsEye’s Brian Babich

Business telecommunications provider BullsEye Telecom appointed Brian Babich (pictured) as vice president of channel sales.

Babich is a 22-year telecom veteran who has served in both direct and channel sales leadership roles at BullsEye. Tim Basa, who previously held this position, is now president at Telegration.

Read more about Babich here, or if you want to hear from him directly, listen to our podcast.

Channel People on the Move: ViaSat’s Steve Lusk

ViaSat, the global provider of satellite broadband and wireless services, named Steve Lusk as eastern region channel sales manager for Business Solutions. In this role, Lusk is responsible for driving revenue growth of Exede Business high-speed satellite internet service through ViaSat’s East Coast channel partners.

Lusk has been has been with ViaSat for more than 12 years. He lives and works in the Boston area. 

Channel People on the Move: Cohesity’s Mark Parrinello

Cohesity, the secondary storage provider, hired a new sales leader.

It’s Mark Parrinello, who now serves as vice president of worldwide sales for the Santa Clara, California-based company. His job involves working with customers as well as reseller partners. Parrinello most recently worked at Nimble Storage, where he was VP of sales for the Americas. That involved expanding Nimble Storage’s channel program and customer base.

Ger more info about Cohesity and Parrinello here.

Channel People on the Move: Involta’s Jean O’Neill

Involta, the provider of managed IT, cloud and data center services, has a new vice president of channel management.

It’s Jean O’Neill, who was instrumental in building channel programs at Rackspace and Terremark/Verizon. Look for O’Neill to work with VARs, MSPs, consultants, systems integrators, OEMs, ISVs and distributors.

Looking for more on O’Neill? Get it here.

Channel People on the Move: Avaya’s Gary Levy and Walter Denk

While dealing with its chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, Avaya appointed two new channel chiefs for the United States and globally.

Gary Levy (left) is the new vice president of U.S. channel, and Walter Denk (right) takes the role of worldwide channel leader. The announcement was made on the final day of Avaya’s Engage conference for partners, customers and others in Las Vegas.

Denk will be responsible for creating and executing Avaya’s partner strategy, architecture and policy management of the Avaya Edge partner program. Also, he will lead revenue growth through the channel, which includes more than 7,000 partners globally. Levy has been working with Avaya’s partners for 20 years, and has established a number of programs. Most recently, he was Avaya’s East region channel leader from Florida to Maine.

Read our Q&A with the new leadership here, or check out our image gallery from Avaya Engage here.

Channel People on the Move: Nimble Storage’s Keegan Riley

Keegan Riley is the new vice president of Americas sales at Nimble Storage, the predictive flash storage provider. He has been with Nimble since 2012.

The company originally recruited Riley to run the West sales area, which he helped grow to become Nimble Storage’s top-performing revenue producer within one year. Before Nimble, he held sales leadership positions in global and enterprise accounts at HP within the computing giant’s storage division, and sales roles at EMC Corp.

You can read more about him here.

Channel People on the Move: Fuze’s Colin Doherty

Fuze, the cloud-based communications solution for the modern global enterprise, named Colin Doherty (pictured) as the company’s CEO. Founder and former CEO Steve Kokinos will serve as executive chairman.

Doherty joins Fuze after 10 years of holding CEO positions at BTI Systems and Arbor Networks. Most recently, Doherty served as CEO of Dyn, the DNS company, which was recently acquired by Oracle.

Read more about Fuze and Doherty here.

Channel People on the Move: Worksoft’s Mike Solomon

Automation software provider Worksoft brought on a new sales leader for the Western hemisphere.

Mike Solomon is now working as the Addison, Texas-based company’s senior vice president of sales for the Americas. The company has tasked him with growing sales “in response to rapidly increasing market demand for automation solutions.”

Solomon spent the previous eight years at Kronos as U.S. manager of services and distribution.

Learn more about Solomon’s background here.

Channel People on the Move: SecureAuth’s Jeffrey Kukowski

SecureAuth, the access control and management provider, appointed Jeff Kukowski, formerly the company’s COO, as its new CEO, while founder and former CEO Craig Lund remains involved with the business as chairman of the board.

Before joining SecureAuth, Kukowski was COO at Taser International and Axon, and held senior leadership positions at Destinator (now Intrinsync), Cyclone Commerce (now Axway) and Rims (now Cognizant). Kukowski tells Channel Partners he is a “big proponent of making the pie bigger for trusted partners.”

Click here to learn more about Kukowski’s rise up the ranks at SecureAuth.

Channel People on the Move: Intelisys, Avaya, RapidScale, More

Missed last month’s “people” gallery? Click here to see who was on the move in January.

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