Crayon has named long time rhipe executive Warren Nolan as its head of channel and strategy as the company finalises its integration of the cloud focussed distributor.
“We have a partner-first commitment,” said Crayon Asia Pacific boss Rhonda Robati said in a statement. “To maintain this position and support our partners, we are bringing our teams together and we are thrilled that Warren Nolan (former rhipe Group Executive) will lead the strategic partner business across the region as Senior Vice President for Channel and Strategy.”
“Additionally, Florent Bellahsene will be leading Crayon’s sales and services business as the newly appointed Senior Vice President of Sales & Services,” Robati said.
Robati told CRN in a joint interview with Nolan that the result of Crayon’s acquisition of rhipe was “combining two companies with complementary services, to add value to what our partner community is doing”.
Nolan said the combined organisation would be partner focused.
“We're extremely channel orientated. It's all about how to mitigate risk from a partner's business and help them be as profitable as possible and working in partnership with them.
“Crayon’s dedication to that same model with their partner community means that for me, when it comes to talking to our channel partners and I've had the opportunity to get out and meet customers face to face and when talking to them about what it means for them, what I've been able to reassure them is that it is going to be an additive situation.”
“It is going to be a situation, as Rhonda said, where they've got access to more products and programs from vendors that they didn't have before, services on offer that we didn't have to offer them in the past and in terms of our people, there's there's a great opportunity for growth as well within a larger organisation.”
Nolan said the other benefit of the acquisition was the addition of expertise.
“Crayon has got probably a deeper bench of technical people who can help partners when it comes to things like infrastructure migration, hypervisor migration and building out solutions to go to market with, as well as software, asset management services and compliance issues.
Robati added that she was particularly interested in exploring how to tap the Australian partner community for solutions and services Crayon could offer in other parts of the region.
“One of the areas I'm certainly keen to explore, to accelerate on, is helping our partners across the region provide their services in a complementary way to the direct side of the business. We do that a little bit across the region, but we certainly have some initiatives in place to accelerate in that area over the coming year. So we're looking forward to that.”
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