Blue Coat poaches Dunne to run channel

Former Bloxx and Websense director takes reins at web content security vendor's EMEA channel business

Blue Coat has poached industry stalwart Pat Dunne (pictured) to run its EMEA channel and has created a cloud-dedicated role for his predecessor.

Dunne, who was previously vice president of sales at rival vendor Bloxx and before that worked at Websense, joined Blue Coat this week in the post of EMEA channel director.

Blue Coat's previous channel head, Jurgen Venhorst, has moved into the newly created role of director of EMEA channel development and solutions, cloud.

Dunne competed fiercely against Blue Coat at Bloxx and Websense and claimed his new employer has a strong reputation in the channel.

"The channel tends to love Blue Coat, which is very difficult if you are competing against it," he told ChannelWeb.

"Most resellers aspire to work with Blue Coat in the enterprise security space. The other side of the business is wide area networks and we are working to get the right channel in place there."

Blue Coat stressed that Venhorst's role has been created specifically to build out Blue Coat's recently launched managed security portfolio with partners.

Nigel Hawthorn, EMEA marketing vice president, said: "It is important to emphasise that we see a great opportunity for us and our channel partners in security cloud services. We felt we needed that extra drive from a director level to target existing MSSPs and resellers that do not currently offer managed security solutions."

Dunne said it was too early to list priorities. "Most of the things I have seen have been very good. There are always tweaks you can make here or there, but Blue Coat has a strongly respected channel organisation."

Dunne has also worked for Trend Micro and NetIQ, where he overlapped with Blue Coat's recently hired EMEA vice president Marc Andrews.