Former HPE Channel Exec New Partner Leader at Virtana

Cloud migration and cost optimization provider Virtana wants to expand its addressable market and is betting that former HPE channel exec Leslie Maher will accelerate growth for the 14-year-old company.

Maher replaces Bob Kilbride, the former VMware channel executive hired by Virtana last year. Virtana tapped the industry veteran to lead its global partner ecosystem and strategic alliances. Besides HPE, Maher held roles at Cisco and Sun Microsystems for over two decades.

Virtana’s Leslie Maher

Among several roles Maher served in her eight years at HPE, she was VP of North America channels and ecosystem. During the nearly three years as HPE’s North America channel leader, Maher said she accelerated the shift among HPE channel partners to recurring revenue led by the company’s GreenLake managed services offering.

Steve Herskowitz, Virtana’s chief revenue officer, is also an HPE veteran. The two worked together there. Herskowitz has designs on Maher boosting Virtana’s sales across all indirect channels, including solution providers, MSPs, systems integrators, distributors, OEMs and strategic alliances.

Leveraging Relationships

In an interview with Channel Futures, Maher noted that a significant portion of Virtana’s business comes through partners.

“Obviously, we want to continue to leverage the relationships we have and expand on them both from the number of customers that are engaged with those partners, but also broader adoption of the portfolio,” Maher said.

Virtana started out in 2008 as an infrastructure performance monitoring provider. In recent years, Virtana has expanded its analytics capabilities to enable multicloud infrastructure monitoring, cost management and migration planning.

Initially, Virtana integrated with AWS and last year added Microsoft Azure. In January, Virtana announced that its Virtana Cost Management Tool integrates with Google Cloud. Now that it integrates with Google Cloud, customers and service providers can analyze project costs on the three large clouds.

Virtana claims it has 150 customers, but most are large Global 2000 enterprises.

“I think there’s an opportunity for broader customer reach,” Maher said. “Our portfolio now includes not only infrastructure performance management but cloud cost management as well as application migration capabilities.”

Expanding Coverage

The former HPE channel exec said expanding the coverage of Virtana’s cloud cost management tool is a burgeoning opportunity, especially now that many organizations are under pressure to cut cloud costs.

“We can really help partners bolster their capabilities and be really relevant with customers,” she said.

Mainline Information Systems is a longtime Virtana partner dating back to when the company was known as Virtual Instruments. Bob Elliott, Mainline’s VP of storage sales, said Maher has spent considerable time and effort discussing opportunities to expand the implementation of Vitrana’s performance monitoring capabilities.

“Since Leslie has come in, I’ve seen a huge difference with Virtana’s effort to build on our partnership,” Elliott said. “I’m extremely optimistic about working together to build our relationship and business together.”