Arbor Networks Names New Channel Chief

The maker of distributed denial-of-service attack prevention appliances said Tuesday that it promoted Jeremy Nicholls to global vice president of channel sales and alliances. Nicholls spent two years heading channel sales and business development in Arbor's EMEA region.

Nicholls said the health and maturity of Arbor's global channel sales and alliances program would be his biggest responsibility.

[Related: Arbor Networks Retools Partner Program In Wake Of High Profile DoS Attacks ]

"My two immediate charters are to bolster revenue driven through our channel and alliances partnerships and to make it easier for our partners to work with us," Nicholls said in a statement. "Arbor puts such important technology into the hands of partners all over the world, and I look forward to working closely with them to evolve existing partner relationships and to create new ones, going forward."

Prior to Arbor, Nicholls was vice president of sales, EMEA at Niksun and ran direct sales teams and channel sales in enterprise and service provider markets.

Nicholls replaces industry veteran Bill Lipsin, who took a position in August as vice president of global channels and systems integrators at Brocade. Lipsin was at Arbor for two years and is responsible for helping build the company's partner and alliance program. He was recognized as CRN 2013 Channel Chief.

Arbor is trying to fuel sales of its appliances to address increased attention on the dangers posed by DDoS attacks. U.S. banks were hit by a wave of attacks from hacktivists at the end of 2012. Meanwhile, a study conducted by several security firms found financially motivated cybercriminals using DDoS as a tactic to drain bank accounts.

Arbor introduced a four-tier program this year with benefits and incentives to attract more partners and broaden sales of its Pravail line of appliances into enterprise data centers. The company's Peakflow appliances are sold to major service providers.

The company is still in partner recruitment mode, attempting to find partners in certain regions with skilled sales professionals and network security staff to deploy the appliances. In addition to back-end rebates, Arbor provides deal registration, marketing and sales and technical training to partners.

PUBLISHED OCT. 8, 2013