Equinox lasts six months for Green

Phil Green, channel sales manager at Equinox Solutions Through Partnership, has abruptly left the distributor after only six months in the job.

Phil Green, channel sales manager at Equinox Solutions Through Partnership, has abruptly left the distributor after only six months in the job.

Green, who joined from Ilion in September, left after "failing to make the transition", said Duncan Crook, Equinox's managing director.

Crook said he had had a number of discussions with Green over recent months about the direction the sales team needed to go in, but Green had been unable to make the changes that needed to be made.

"Sometimes transition just doesn't work," Crook said. "Sometimes it just doesn't fit. It was just that the direction we are going in was not the transition he could make.

"He believes in our model and if he'd been given an extra six to eight months, he would have managed to finalise the transition. But we are growing rapidly."

Crook said that Green's departure would not affect the implementation of Equinox's channel strategy.

Nor had Green's failure affected the distributor's performance over the past six months, and his was departure not part of a larger reorganisation, Crook said.

"We have operated to a very defined business plan and we continue to do that. We will grow by over 100 per cent this year. There are no other associated changes related to this. This is not part of a fundamental reshuffle," he said.

A new channel sales manager will be announced in the next few weeks.

• Crook has renewed his criticism of the managed network services offered by other distributors, arguing they do not assume the risk of meeting customer expectations. In a company newsletter which is distributed to VARs, Crook warned that all resellers except expert networking integrators risked getting caught out by "box-shifting" attitudes to bandwidth provision.

Crook also referred to a recent managed networking services launch by Westcon as a "hop-on-the-bandwagon" move. Westcon launched a managed network service last month.

But John Chapman, business development director at Westcon, said networking specialists wanted to offer an end-to-end service themselves and did not want to "back everything off" to the distributor.