Brocade names new global, APAC channel chief

Executive reshuffle.

Brocade yesterday confirmed several vice president-level executive changes, including current worldwide channel chief Barbara Spicek's move to a new role, and a new vice president of global channel sales and marketing taking her place.

Spicek will return to her native Germany to run Brocade's EMEA OEM business unit. New to the channel chief role is Regan McGrath, formerly Brocade's vice president of Americas sales.

McGrath is a tech veteran of more than 25 years, 12 of them at Brocade. Tom Ellery, former vice president of sales for Brocade's enterprise LAN business, has taken over McGrath's Americas sales post.

Charlie Foo, most recently senior director of Brocade's Partner Business Group for the APAC region, is now vice president of the APAC region, based in Singapore.

Ian Whiting, Brocade senior vice president, worldwide sales, said the executives represent "the best of the best within our sales organisation."

Under Spicek, Brocade significantly expanded its Alliance Partner Network program, luring partners with pay-for-performance-based revenue incentives. About 65 percent of Brocade sales now go through partners, and during Brocade's sales kickoff last fall, its sales force was charged with getting that number to 80 percent by the end of the year, Spicek told CRN.

Spicek became Brocade's global channel chief in January 2009, a month after Brocade completed its $US2.6 billion acquisition of Foundry Networks. SAN products still dominate Brocade's field presence, although the company has continued to broaden its Ethernet networking and data centre fabric offerings.

A year ago, Brocade introduced CloudPlex, its strategy for combining compute, storage and networking components into a converged architecture.

Brocade reports its second fiscal quarter results later this week.

This article originally appeared at crn.com