CMS exec joins Beta's band

Tony Howard becomes enterprise business development manager at fellow distie Beta Distribution

Beta Distribution has poached CMS Distribution's enterprise manager, Tony Howard.

He is not the first senior figure CMS has lost in recent months, with CRN revealing that Andy Bass, its former sales director, left to join Lenovo in September.

Howard, who started at Beta last week, has become the distributor's new enterprise business development manager.

Beta, which is now focused on the storage space, said Howard will initially be responsible for its Overland, Infortrend, Falconstor, Sphere3D and Synerway vendors.

Nigel Morris, Beta's marketing director, said he was attracted to Howard's experience working at both distributors and vendors.

Howard has been at CMS since 2012, according to his LinkedIn page. Prior to that he was at CCI Distribution for three years and before that he founded EScon Digital Storage Solutions. In total he has worked in the channel for 30 years.

Ricky Patel, Beta's enterprise business manager, who previously worked with Howard at CMS, said he was delighted with the new recruit.

"From our perspective, it's good to get people like Tony [Howard] on board," he said. "He will bring some strong relationships as well as some key vendor relationships. We have been adding to our team and his appointment falls [into] part of this."

A CMS representative said Howard departed for "mainly personal" reasons, and would not comment further.