Carbonite's Channel Chief Out Amid Restructuring Of Channel Organization

Carbonite Channel Chief Jon Whitlock is no longer with the data-protection vendor after a restructuring of its channel organization, Carbonite confirmed Tuesday to CRN.

After a couple of years of rapid scaling on the back of major acquisitions, Carbonite came to the conclusion it wanted to break up channel sales and marketing and place them under two separate parts of the company, Norman Guadagno, senior vice president of marketing, told CRN.

Channel sales will remain under the larger sales organization, with the team reporting directly to senior vice president of global sales Paul Mellinger until a new leader is found for that division.

[Related: Carbonite Completes Sales Reorg Following EVault Acquisition: Mellinger Stays, Doggett Leaves]

The channel marketing division that previously operated, under Whitlock's leadership, as a unified entity with channel sales, will be shifted into the marketing organization, led by Guadagno.

Whitlock had been promoted to the channel chief position last March, only a few months after he joined Carbonite in another channel role. The search is on, both internally and externally, for a new executive to run channel sales exclusively, Guadagno said.

The motivation for the restructuring was the growth of the business after a series of acquisitions in the last three years: Datacastle, for endpoint backup; Double-Take, for high-availability and migrations; and EVault, for disaster recovery.

"As part of that set of acquisitions, we've obviously been growing the company, been continually trying to get the structure right to support all of the channel partners we've brought on," Guadagno said.

Carbonite has moved most of its business into the midmarket with the technologies it had acquired, and launched a new channel program last year.

"We're trying to understand what's the organizational structure that will work best," Guadagno said.

Guadagno has spent the last two years building out the marketing organization to operate in a more scalable fashion, he said.

"Channel marketing had lived in the channel organization, which had lived in the sales organization," he said, purely as a result of the company's history.

"But as we were rebuilding out the marketing organization, we saw the opportunity to scale up for the channel organization as well, to take what we've done successfully in customer marketing to channel marketing."

It was a natural evolution of the business that called for a transition of leadership, leading to Whitlock's departure last week, Guadagno said.

"I have worked with Jon for many years now and I am definitely sorry to see him go. Jon is a great marketing executive that really knows how to cater to and build up his channel partners. I am looking forward to seeing what he is going to do next,’ said James Range, president of Dallas-based Carbonite partner White Rock Security.