Chris Delvin may have been working in England managing many diverse cultures and regions as the general manager for indirect sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Computer Associates, but his heart was always in Canada.
A native of Toronto, Devlin has returned home, after four years
in Europe, to be reappointed as CA Canada’s vice-president of channel sales. He’ll still report to George Kafkarkou, senior vice president of worldwide channel operations at CA. Kafkarkou along with Ira Simon, North American channel director and Devlin created last year’s partner profitability channel program for CA which offered significantly higher margins for resellers.
In Canada, Devlin wants to create more enterprise channel partners for the subsidiary. “The place were I can build the most traction is to get more people specialized in infrastructure-type business in data life cycle management, storage, security and network infrastructure management,” he said.
He added that CA Canada is looking for partners who have some expertise in intrusion, access management and in storage resource management.
Devlin believes there is a big opportunity in storage resource management here. There are companies who have more than 100,000 terabytes of data and with storage resource management they can save approximately 10 per cent of that data, he said.
“Ten per cent equates to 20,000 terabytes, and that is a few million dollars in savings. We need partners who can do that, and it takes specialization. I am not looking for a tonne of those kinds of people, but I am looking for people who can execute and invest in delivering that kind of technology and services with CA.”
In the small-to-medium size business market Devlin wants to establish more multi-vendor partnerships to deliver packaged security solutions. For example, CA recently struck an OEM arrangement with Network Engines to build a CA-branded security appliance for the SMB channel. “There is a big opportunity for resellers and distributors to work together and I want CA to play in more multi-vendor partnerships to address the most fundamental SMB security problems such as access and recovery,” he said.
Devlin also said that the recent stepping down of CEO Sanjay Kumar will have no adverse impact on his plans for the Canadian channel.
“Sanjay (Kumar) started many great things, including a new renewed commitment to the channel. He understands that in business, partnerships are key. That started under Sanjay and will continue under the new leader,” Devlin said.
