Cisco Channel Veteran Named VP Sales For PCS

The appointment comes with Shelton, Conn.-based PCS, whose annual sales were up 35 percent in 2010 to $36.7 million, moving aggressively to provide its customers with next generation private cloud computing solutions.

Forziati is leading up an aggressive expansion of the solution provider's VCE (Virtual Compute Environment) business in the Boston market. Specifically, Forziati is charged with developing sales relationships with VMware, Cisco and EMC executives in the Northeast and is already recruiting new sales talent.

PCS, which uses the tagline, 'Making The Cloud A Reality,' has won raves from customers for its 24-hour/ 7-day-a-week "Critical Care" support of mission critical data center environments. The service, which is hailed as one of the keys to PCS's 95 percent customer retention rate, provides customers frustrated with maintaining a wide array of services and maintenance contracts from multiple vendors with a single, comprehensive, multivendor services offering.

The Boston market expansion represents a potential sales windfall for PCS as customers of all kinds move to cloud computing solutions based on best of breed technologies from VMware, Cisco and EMC, said Forziati. "Customers are already seeing the benefits of VCE and Cisco Unified Compute System," he said. "Combining VCE with PCS's Critical Care offering provides customers with a next generation platform that is cost-effective, scales and has unparalleled network management capabilities. PCS has best in class cloud technical talent and solutions."

PCS's Critical Care service is the "secret ingredient that customers are looking for in order to move to the cloud," said Forziati. "They need a partner that can implement, manage and service their infrastructure so that they spend more time on their own business rather than worrying about IT."

PCS has also been one of Cisco's go to partners for next generation data centers and the Cisco Unified Computing System, which has exploded onto the market with a sales run rate of nearly $1 billion.

Forziati, who joins other former Cisco sales and technical talent at PCS, including PCS CTO Jeff Clark, a former Cisco engineering manager, says he has never seen a faster sales uptick on a product than Cisco's Unified Computing System.

Forziati started at Cisco as one of the company's first channel account managers in the channel organization in 1996 and moved up the ranks to manager of partner operations in the Northeast. His Cisco tenure came during a period of astronomical growth with the company growing from $6.4 billion in annual sales for the 1997 fiscal year to $40 billion ended July 31, 2010.

Forziati, who was recognized by Cisco for partner loyalty and profitability initiatives, was known among partners for developing strong ties between Cisco's direct sales team and partners. "For me it was always about helping customers by bringing them together with Cisco partners and Cisco accounts teams," he said. "It was really satisfying to see customers benefit from the solutions that Cisco and its partners brought to the table."