Citrix Vets Join Instart to Build Multichannel Sales Organization

A group of executives who worked together at Citrix have joined Instart, a startup that provides a digital experience cloud that’s designed to improve web and mobile application performance, customer experience and security.

The company has appointed the following new senior executives: Tom Flink as chief revenue officer; Mitch Parker as chief customer officer; Natalie Lambert as chief marketing officer; and Thirumalesh Reddy as senior vice president of engineering.

Most recently, Flink – a 2014-2015 inductee in the Channel Partners Circle of Excellence – was Forcepoint’s vice president of global channel sales. Parker founded myppl. Lambert was chief marketing officer at Sapho, which Citrix acquired; and Reddy was vice president of software engineering with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Instart’s Tom Flink

Flink will build the company’s global enterprise sales team, leveraging his experience leading direct sales, alliances and indirect channels at Citrix, RES Software and Forcepoint. He tells Channel Partners that he and his colleagues joined Instart because it has a “great set of technology, a set of marquee customers, they’re well-known and recognized — and then there’s the people.”

“Clearly working with people who you’ve had a past successful experience with is an attraction by itself, but that wouldn’t be enough if the company didn’t have the ingredients of success already baked in,” he said. “And so after understanding where CEO Sumit Dhawan wanted the company to go, and the board of directors who I also have some previous experience with, you spend time looking at the technology, and the companies and customers that they’ve been serving, and I became kind of excited about the opportunity.”

Instart technology helps brands like Hearst, Kate Spade, Nieman Marcus, and Office Depot to deliver digital experiences for their customers.

In terms of channel, Instart’s technology set leans more toward DevOps development, SI and consulting type organizations versus pure resell or product-led services companies, Flink said.

“We’re going to have to build the basics of a consistent channel organization, and we already have a team that has done some good work, but to date it’s primarily with some larger SIs that we’ve been working with on a global basis to primarily serve markets where we don’t have coverage ourselves,” he said. “And then we do have a few resellers that are very specifically focused on parts of the world where we don’t have a presence. And the other piece of that outside of pure channel [are] the alliances relationships.”

Initially, Instart will focus primarily on relationships rather than programs, and “then once we learn how to successfully drive those relationships … and understand where we all are and how we all add value in the process of delivering to the customer, then I think it will be time to build an actual program,” Flink said.

The new executives join Instart as the company continues to expand its customer list, enabling them to focus on driving scale into the business. Each possesses a “deep understanding” of enterprise customer needs and the business strategies that will deliver on Instart’s mission to help deliver …

… the best website experience to their customers, the company said.

“Strategically my focus is to build a multichannel sales organization,” Flink said. “That involves the expansion of routes to market, inserts and leverage into the sales engine through partnerships, and along with that build predictability and repeatability into our sales motion. At the end of the day, that’s the job of anybody in my role — create predictability, create scale and create leverage.”

Parker will focus on the company’s customers’ needs and success while leading the product and services teams, and Lambert will drive market awareness, demand generation and enablement of Instart and its product offerings. Reddy is charged with scaling engineering and operations across the Instart product portfolio to meet present and future customer needs.

“It’s an amazing time to be at Instart, and adding these executives to our team not only allows us to accelerate the strategic development of our products but also to increase market awareness and engagement with current and potential customers,” Dhawan said.