Novell signs channel boss amid distie rejig

Novell has appointed a new business partner sales director ahead of its distribution shake-up, to be announced later this week.

Julie White was previously involved with technical services at Novell. She will now be responsible for all sales, marketing and business development activity within its channel.

White told CRN that Novell will announce "a rationalisation of its distribution model", which she claimed is an attempt to merge its own model with SuSE's, following its acquisition by Novell in January 2004.

"We are putting together the best distribution model for Novell and integrating SuSE into it. We also want to grow our partner base," White said.

"We are having a look at how we do things, which partners we use and at our strategy, to realise business opportunities. VARs will be provided with a full solution stack and be able to sell to customers they may not have reached before."

The channel is rife with speculation that Novell may look to prevent resellers buying directly from it, instead routing partner sales through its distributors.

Scott Fletcher, managing director of system integrator ANS, said such a move would be positive for the channel. "Novell upset some distributors when it allowed resellers to buy direct last year," he said.

In December last year Novell tightened up channel accreditation, merged two partner models and clamped down on channel conflict in the hope of achieving a 70 per cent indirect, 30 per cent direct split.

Nigel Pearson, UK director of training at Azlan, which recently signed as a Novell training partner, said: "Unless Novell decides to bring all of its training back in-house, I don't think there will be any bombshells."

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