Former Ingram VP Lands At Cleveland VAR

It's a new frontier in a familiar space for DiMarco, a longtime channel presence who worked at Ingram for 25 years but now finds himself in a role that provides much closer interaction with end-user technology customers.

"It's been great coming on board with these guys," DiMarco told CRN Wednesday. "I hadn't spent a lot of time initially pursuing opportunities with some of my former customers -- I hadn't really thought through that. But toward the close of the year, MCPc got in touch with me about an executive opportunity they had."

DiMarco, who had been vice president and general manager, U.S. value-added resellers and market development sales, at Ingram since 2004, left the distributor following a May 2010 management shakeup.

He said he examined a number of opportunities inside the IT channel and in adjacent markets, but eventually found his way into discussions with MCPc, his customer while at Ingram.

"We spent about two months going back and forth," DiMarco said. "They wanted to hire an EVP of sales to manage sales, but also vendor management and marketing and be responsible for what you'd call their go-to-market strategy relative to customers. The more I heard about their growth story and their value proposition, the more I got interested."

Among other accolades, MCPc was named to CRN's Fast Growth 100 list in 2009, ranked the No. 4 fastest growing technology provider with sales over $100 million, and was also No. 214 on the 2009 VAR 500 listing.

Its major vendor partnerships include Cisco, HP, Lenovo, VMware, Dell and Citrix, and its focus areas include data center, virtualization, cloud, lifecyle management, networking, print and imaging management and a number of vertical interests, including a growing health-care practice. It's a national VAR, concentrated most heavily in Ohio, the Ohio Valley, and Western New York and Pennsylvania, but with expanding business in the southeast, midwest and parts of the west coast.

DiMarco, who recently relocated to Cleveland from the Buffalo, N.Y. area, said his exit from Ingram Micro helped expand his horizons.

"I had wanted to move into a different role, and we weren't able to make it work," he said of the circumstances his departure. "I'd been in that role or one like it for 12 years, so I wanted to do something different."