Portal hopes new CEO will Cook up a storm

Newly appointed sales and marketing boss Laurence Cook to take the top job

IBM partner Portal has promoted its sales and marketing director Laurence Cook to the role of chief executive as it unveils a new strategy.

Cook only joined Portal in November last year, but the firm hopes promoting him to the top job will help drive its new strategy which revolves around bringing together analytics, social, mobility and cloud technology.

"I am delighted to be taking the helm and building off this strong platform to drive significant growth over the next three years," Cook said on his appointment.

Under the new management regime, Portal will create a new Innovation and Partnership division which will be headed up by Portal founder Shamus Kelly (pictured).

The new branch will focus on identifying new technology to add to its portolfio, which Kelly said was important.

"Building on our successful track record and excellent strategic relationship with IBM, we will grow our partner network to take full advantage of the convergence of traditional enterprise IT with digital technologies and cloud-based services to meet the rising need for the flexibility and value that our customers are demanding," he said.