Farmer to plough Ipswitch's channel furrow

Former Barracuda exec Robert Farmer joins storage vendor as senior director of channels and alliances

Ipswitch, a provider of file transfer and storage software, has announced the appointment of Robert Farmer as senior director of channel and alliances in EMEA.

Farmer comes armed with 20-plus years' experience working with the channel and in his new role will focus on partner recruitment and enablement.

Before joining Ipswitch, Farmer held the position of EMEA channel manager at Barracuda and was previously EMEA alliance director at Trend Micro.

"A key learning point that I will be bringing from both previous appointments is to create the right customer environment, where we work with our partners and distributors, making it easy to do business with us," Farmer told CRN.

Ipswitch already works with distributors such as Infinigate, Arrow, Portland and ITway, and partners with Computacenter, Softcat and Orsenna, Farmer said.

"Our expansion plans are very clear internally and we want to improve our market demand with our channel by underpromising and overdelivering," Farmer said.

Speaking about Ipswitch's partner initiative, he said: "The EMEA Ipswitch PartnerSynergy Channel Programme is designed to reward our partners' growth regardless of partnership level.

"It has free marketing resources that include co-branded email templates, banner ads, and event support materials to help execute targeted marketing campaigns. Ipswitch has created a number of sales tools which are available on demand through its partner portal, and these include selling guides and cheat sheets."