CenturyLink, Rackspace Channel Vet Blake Wetzel Gets CRO Job

TeraGo, the provider of cloud, colocation and connectivity services across Canada and internationally, has hired channel veteran Blake Wetzel as its new chief revenue officer.

In his new role, Wetzel is leading sales, channel and business development, marketing, product and customer experience. TeraGo owns a national spectrum portfolio of e24GHz and 38GHz wide-area spectrum licenses including 2,120 MHz of spectrum across Canada’s six largest cities.

TeraGo’s Blake Wetzel

Wetzel founded Wetzel Consulting two years ago, and before that was Rackspace’s vice president of channels. He’s best known in the channel for his run as vice president of CenturyLink Channel Alliance. He also held numerous leadership roles at Qwest Communications before CenturyLink acquired it.

Wetzel tells Channel Partners that after spending a few months advising the TeraGo team, “I saw the incredible potential, caring people and powerful assets that this Canadian IT infrastructure and managed services provider brings to the market.”

“First, I felt I could add value to expand the awareness of an established technology company that combines cloud, collocation, networking, managed services and soon 5G to business customers across Canada,” he said. “Second, having spent over a decade in supporting multinational companies [that] required presence in Canada, I saw great potential to grow channels and alliance[s] throughout the Canadian market for services to support customers growth and IT transformation.”

TeraGo’s channel program is in its infancy, Wetzel said.

“My mission is to develop the premier channel and alliance program in Canada, bringing a whole new market opportunity to the partners I have had the pleasure of working with over the past decade,” he said. “My goal is to work closely with partners to develop the gold standard channel program [in] a market that doesn’t have a history of being channel-friendly.”

Wetzel said the first challenge is to make the North American IT market aware of TeraGo’s capabilities so it can help business customers, ranging from small business to enterprise, with their digital transformations and journeys to the cloud.

“Our approach is to build business-outcome messaging [for] today’s IT buyers through direct and indirect channels and help customers achieve their goals by being a complete IT infrastructure and managed services provider,” he said. “Second, our goal is to is to be able to scale at the pace of our customers’ growth and technology requirements so that we can take advantage of the powerful and growing Canadian market.”

Wetzel said his to-do list includes enhancing TeraGo’s messaging and awareness in the market, “putting in place the building blocks to ensure our customers have the best customer experience possible, developing the best channel program in Canada, launching our first trials in 5G and bringing world-class expertise in cloud and digital transformation to Canadian customers.”