What's In Store For Hanley And Goodwin

Which job would you rather have: running global channel sales for Computer Associates or Cisco? The reason for my question it that both CA and Cisco have recently named new executives to oversee their partner kingdoms. As they get their feet wet or finish up tasks associated with their former duties, what better time than to assess their futures? They should be getting ready for one heck of a ride in the coming year, and I hope both jobs pay what Tiger Woods makes for endorsing golf balls, because they are facing excruciating difficult tasks, will rarely see their loved ones and will be constantly grilled by the press. Let's just pick apart how much fun each executive is going to have--I mean, the business challenges they face.

As you have read, Computer Associates recruited James Hanley, a six-year veteran from EMC, to run its worldwide partner sales efforts. The first question Hanley is going to face from partners is how an executive from EMC wound up running a channel program. Yes, EMC has made progress in the channel as of late, but its culture has been built on ultra-aggressive direct sales to customers. Still, Hanley has burst on the scene vowing to double CA's channel sales (To date, only a small portion--10 percent--of the company's nearly $4 billion in annual sales actually flows through partners.)

What a brave statement in a world where incoming executives give rather dry interviews. Although Hanley did not put a time frame on his ambitious goal, it will be interesting to see if he can do it and just how CA defines a "channel sale" vs. one made direct. Of note, just before Hanley arrived, CA rolled out a new channel and sales coverage model that places some 12,000 customers into the "named-accounts" category, meaning that CA gets first dibs on them. The channel will be allowed to roam freely in the midmarket and small-enterprise account space, but when it comes to companies with sales of $300 million to $1 billion or more, CA wants to control those customers and warns of sales conflict.

Suffice to say, it's not going to be easy for Hanley to navigate that tempest. No doubt the internal compensation plans CA put in place to help its direct-sales team work with the channel will help. And CA has another issue to resolve: Before Hanley joined, the company put more power and responsibility for channels and overall sales in the hands of its territory managers. That means George Fisher, who runs CA's massive North American operations, is ultimately responsible for the performance of its channel. So the management matrix is interesting and calls into question just how quickly Hanley will be able to make decisions. In many cases, incoming executives have honeymoon periods during which they can ease into a new role. Hanley's will be short, at best, considering the merger of Symantec and Veritas makes for a more formidable rival to CA--and one that is channel-centric.

Over at Cisco, following several months of speculation about his future, Paul Mountford relinquished the role of senior vice president of worldwide channels to Keith Goodwin, who was running sales for Latin America and Canada. During his tenure, Mountford had to tackle three major issues: partner conflict with Cisco's sales force, the behavior of unruly large service providers and declines in partner profitability. He built his platform on those three planks and got CEO John Chambers directly involved in addressing and resolving them. He was also fortunate enough to run channels for a vendor with a near lock on the market it served.

Like Hanley, Goodwin is an unknown to partners here in the States, where he will undoubtedly face the toughest questions. Partners have certainly sent an early message to Goodwin, who takes the job Aug. 1, that he should stay the course, building on what Mountford established. I could not disagree more. What Mountford did was good during his tenure, but not for today. Yes, you can always say that improving partner profitability should be priority No. 1, but what does that mean today vs. two or three years ago? Cisco's partners are being recruited not only by direct rivals, such as Juniper, but by other vendors that are not rivals yet want a piece of a Cisco VAR's business (i.e., security vendors). Goodwin needs to get in front of those issues and define the Cisco channel play for VoIP as well. If the opportunity is as big as Cisco and others believe it to be, the company must be viewed as the market leader and agenda-setter in this space. Hopefully, Goodwin will be a good win for Cisco's channel. Just couldn't resist that one.

What's your advice for the new channel execs at CA and Cisco? Let me know at [email protected]; I will pass your thoughts to them or highlight them in my next column. *