Credit: Channel Asia
More than 50 positions of power have changed hands across the Asian channel within the space of 12 months, as the pendulum of power swings at pace.
Channel Asia can reveal that in the space of four quarters - starting 1 August 2018 - more than 30 executive positions have been filled at vendor level, in addition to nine high-profile partner management changes. More than 10 channel chiefs - both regionally and locally - have also been appointed.
The change of senior personnel within ASEAN and the wider Asia market signals a new era of priorities as new teams with new ideas redefine partner strategies.
Specific to channel, VMware recruited Uma Thana Balasingam at a regional level, alongside Fan Qu across Southeast Asia and Korea, while Veeam promoted Belinda Jurisic as channel director of Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) in a newly created role designed to drive regional growth.
Staying at APJ level, other key channel appointments include Anthony Smith at Aruba; Sandra Lee at Kaspersky and Mark Fong at Commvault, alongside Joe McPhillips at Cylance; Andrew Fisher at Pure Storage and Terence Ng at Bitdefender.
Citrix appointed Manish Sharma as vice president of partner sales across APJ, amid a double channel hire in the region, with Srinivas Nadesan assuming the role of regional channel director of Asia - spanning ASEAN and Korea.
In Singapore, Raymond Wong took charge of the IBM channel, while Derrick Ng aligned with Carbon Black and Diwakar Dayal joined Tenable, vacating his security channel sales position across APJ at Cisco.
New partner leaders
Specific to partners, the most notable appointments came from NCS and NTT during the past 12 months.
As reported by Channel Asia, Ng Kuo Pin was appointed as CEO of Singtel wholly-owned subsidiary NCS in July, six months after joining the technology provider as deputy leader.
Ng - who was previously managing director of Accenture - officially assumed the position on 1 August, succeeding Chia Wee Boon, who retired after 10 years with the company.
Furthermore, NTT officially launched to the world in July as a global technology giant housing the capabilities of 28 companies.
Headquartered in London, the $11 billion business will be spearheaded by Jason Goodall and comprises of NTT Communications, Dimension Data and NTT Security, employing around 40,000 staff in offices across more than 70 countries and regions.
Channel Asia revealed that John Lombard was named as CEO of Asia Pacific. Effective 1 July, Lombard is responsible for NTT’s global business in Asia Pacific, excluding Japan and Australia.
Logicalis appointed 30 year veteran Bernard Chiang as new managing director for operations in Malaysia late in 2018, while David Batrouney transitioned out of his role as director of Asia at Datacom in early 2019.
Sourced Group bolstered its executive leadership team in July amid plans to accelerate growth at a global level. To realise such ambitions, the cloud provider promoted John Painter to vice president of strategy and innovation, alongside recruiting Ian McMaugh as managing director of ASEAN and Wilson Lee as chief financial officer.
Other key management appointments at partner-level include Arthur Fernandez as general manager of Asian operations at JCurve Solutions; James Chia as new CEO of NetGain Systems and Benjamin Schönfeld as managing director of Asia at Leaseweb.
In March, Kent Lee resigned from his role as CEO of Dimension Data in Singapore, six months after assuming the top position.
Vendor changes
From a vendor standpoint, new regional leaders were appointed at HP; Sophos; Citrix; NetApp; Equinix; Ruckus Networks and Toshiba, in the form of Ng Tian Chong; Gavin Struthers; Colin Brookes; Steve Dixon; Jeremy Deutsch; Gary Newbold and Ryuji Maruyama.
At an ASEAN level, Conor McNamara is set to assume the role of managing director of Amazon Web Services (AWS), replacing Nick Walton who is returning to his native New Zealand. Singapore-based McNamara - currently head of business development across Asia Pacific - will take over in the second half of 2019. Meanwhile, Catherine Lian was appointed as managing director of IBM in Malaysia.
In April, VMware strengthened capabilities across channel, customer and product divisions through three executive appointments across Southeast Asia and Korea.
Specifically, the vendor appointed Malis Selamat as director of commercial business, Michael Hoo as head of solution architect practice and Karthik Viswanathan as regional director of CloudHealth across the region.
Commvault appointed Grace Ho as a first chief of staff for Asia Pacific, who also leads the vendor’s business across the region as area vice president of ASEAN. In addition, Autodesk appointed Paul Wilson as regional director of sales across ASEAN and Equinix recruited Yee May Leong to lead South Asia as managing director.
Delving deeper at in-country level, Hitesh Prajapati was appointed as new country manager of Singapore at Vertiv, following his departure as country manager of Malaysia, which he has held since 2015.
Three key appointments impacted the Malaysian market through Avinash Gowda as country manager of Nutanix; Teoh Wooi Keat as country manager of Vertiv and Lim Bee Wah as Enterprise Commercial lead at Microsoft.
In the Philippines, Andrés Ortola took charge as country general manager of Microsoft while former Microsoft managing director Karrie Ilagan assumed the position of country manager at Cisco.
Market movers
In other market changes, Matthew Oostveen was appointed as CTO and vice president of APJ at Pure Storage, weeks after exiting Dell EMC.
Appointments also came in the form of Anneliese Schulz; James McCready; Jao Won; Peter Hughes and Ned Speed, at Software AG; Adobe; Nokia; RingCentral and FusionGrove respectively.
Furthermore, new roles also came for Christopher Ho at Actifio; Mike Cawsey at Blue Prism; Jeroen Nooijen at MobileIron, Gene Ng at BeyondTrust and William Ho at Cohesity.
