Intermedia Goes 'Channel-First,' Hires Microsoft Alums

**Editor’s Note: Click here to see which channel people were on the move in December or here for a list of recent important channel-program changes you should know.**

Intermedia, the cloud business application provider, is investing heavily in the channel.

The Mountain View, California-based company is restructuring its sales in order increase support for its partners. The company is leaning on the channel as it seeks to double in size from a $200 million organization to a $400 million organization. Eric Martorano, senior vice president of worldwide sales, says Intermedia is adding 30 new employees that will focus mainly on supporting channel sales. There are currently about 90 people in Intermedia’s sales organization.

“My expectation is, by the end of 2017, we’ll see north of 80 percent of our new business coming from our channel community,” Martorano told Channel Partners.

Intermedia is also offering its partners new resources for sales enablement, co-marketing and co-selling. Martorano says the reorganized sales structure contains five “centers of excellence”: sales enablement and engineering, sales operations, business development, partner management and customer management.{ad}

Intermedia has made several key hires and promotion to support those goals, including Eric Roach, vice president of field channel sales; Bob Neal, director of distribution and strategic communities; and David Tiller, director of sales enablement and engineering. Roach and Neal both spent several years working at Microsoft, where Martorano worked.

Martorano says his past experiences as general manager of U.S. partner sales for the technology giant showed him the value of the channel.

“Having that experience, seeing what the channel can do, being part of the channel, I know how important it is,” he said. “You can’t just talk the talk though. You’ve got to walk the walk.”

Martorano told Channel Partners in a Q&A back in September that Intermedia would pursue a channel-first strategy. He says he continues to pursue smoothing out struggles between indirect and direct sales within the organization.

“I’m going to remove that conflict. I’m going to do everything I can to go all in with this channel-first approach. And the beginning of that is building out an organization that’s going to allow us to do that,” he said.

He thanked existing partners for their participation in Intermedia’s program and invited the rest of the channel community to embrace the change.

“We’re on this journey to what I call greatness,” he said. “In order to do that, we will stumble; we will fall along the way. But ultimately, we will achieve success together.”