AT&T Taps New Leader for Partner Exchange

(pictured above: AT&T’s Brooks McCorcle and Zee Hussain on stage at AT&T Partner Exchange Summit in Dallas, Oct. 10.)

**Editor’s Note: Click here to see which channel people were on the move in September.**

AT&T PARTNER EXCHANGE SUMMIT — Members of AT&T Partner Exchange are getting a clearer picture of how the company’s channel realignment will impact them.

AT&T’s Randall Porter

The reseller program made numerous product and personnel announcements at the Partner Exchange Summit in Dallas. Brooks McCorcle is retiring from her role as president of AT&T Partner Solutions, which oversaw Partner Exchange, and she introduced her replacement to a crowd of partners Tuesday.

Zee Hussain now serves as division president of AT&T Partner Solutions, and the new job puts him over all three AT&T channel organizations. Partner Exchange, the AT&T Alliance Channel and ACC Business all will ultimately report to him now.

With McCorcle’s retirement, Randall Porter, vice president of partner management and business development for AT&T Partner Exchange, will be the figurehead for the channel program. McCorcle tells Channel Partners that Porter has worked with her since the beginning of the program.

“The way I look at it is that Partner Exchange has reached a level of maturity now where we can run it under one VP leader,” McCorcle said in an interview. “And Randall’s a perfect choice. He’s been with me there since day one, and I have a lot of confidence in him as a leader.”

Kevin Leonard remains the leader of the AT&T Alliance Channel, and J.D. Baker continues to lead ACC Business. Leonard, Baker and Porter all will report to Hussain. The new AT&T Partner Solutions leader told Channel Partners that he has spent much of the conference speaking to exhibitors and partners and getting their feedback on the change.

“As I look at it, I think having all three of the organizations – Partner Exchange, Alliance, ACC – gives us tremendous opportunity to do it right for every single one of those channels, so I’m very excited about that,” Hussain said.

Rickie Richey is the CEO of Altaworx, which is a member of Alliance Channel and the first member of Partner Exchange. He says he likes the changes and hopes that they will bring additional resources to partners like his company.

“I’ve always suspected that one day Alliance Channel and Partner Exchange would end up in one place,” Richey said. “It didn’t surprise me when that happen.”

He says his company joined Partner Exchange in 2013 because it was looking to develop a recurring-revenue model. That has been a success.

“We wanted to transition our business from …

… 97 percent non-recurring to recurring,” he said. ” Now we’re 93 percent recurring.”

A Send-off

McCorcle announced her retirement last week, saying that she was looking forward to spending more time as a grandmother. While the Partner Exchange Summit included numerous product unveilings, sponsor presentations and keynotes, Tuesday’s morning cast a major spotlight on McCorcle, who was a chief architect of the partner program.

“I see the future being big and bright,” she told Channel Partners. “I think we are way far away from saturation. That to me just means more opportunity for solution providers who want to invest in their growth.”

AT&T announced Tuesday that Partner Exchange is adding Flexware, a network function virtualization offering, and AT&T Collaborate, a set of collaboration tools, to its portfolio. The company devoted two keynote sessions to discussing the new technologies AT&T is trying to tackle with its partners. Chris Penrose, senior vice president of IoT solutions for AT&T Mobility, shared statistics on how businesses feel about IoT. For example, he said 98 percent of executives want to include connected devices in their strategies and 72 percent of retailers want to change their supply chain using IoT-enabled capabilities.

Mo Katibeh, chief marketing officer of AT&T Business, brought up the interesting example of a “connected onesie,” which goes to show how IoT will impact virtually every vertical — even though most will never use the phrase “Internet of Things.”

“Frankly, everything can be connected, and there are wants and needs that we don’t even know we need, both as businesses and consumers, that IoT connected devices are going to fulfill,” Katibeh said.

The summit concludes Wednesday.