NetApp's new UK boss to target enterprise growth

Storage vendor chooses Chris Greenwood to head up UK business

Developing a robust partner ecosystem and growing the number of its enterprise customers is top of the agenda for NetApp's new UK general manager.

Chris Greenwood has spent the past nine years at NetApp in a variety of senior roles, mainly in the Nordics and Eastern Europe.

He took up the reins on 1 May, succeeding Nick Thurlow in the role.

Greenwood (pictured) told CRN that he is eager to grab more of the market opportunity in the UK.

"I am really keen to engage in the UK market where we've got significant presence and a market opportunity," he said.

"It is mainly focused on growth, and in the last 12 months we've seen some really good developments with our business."

Greenwood's focus is on the "must-win" areas of cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), DevOps and more traditional workloads, such as enterprise applications, as well as strengthening his sales strategy.

"We've built and will deploy a sales strategy, which is really focused on three key things: investing in enterprise business, having more enterprise account managers focused on key accounts and fully leveraging our much broader portfolio," he said.

"And also win with new customers that have never bought from NetApp before, some of those might be cloud-only customers.

"So they might have no intention of ever owning a datacentre or ever owning a piece of physical infrastructure, but with the portfolio we have now, we believe that we can acquire those customers using our cloud software products."

Greenwood said that leveraging this portfolio to gain new customers is a "big bet" for its UK business and that it has invested in resources for its sales team and its partners to win new customers and logos.

"My ambition is just to make sure that we're a finely tuned sales engine and we support our customers in the best possible way," he said.

"I think NetApp has proved over its 27-year history that it has been a very partner-orientated company.

"With my background developing different partner ecosystems in the UK I'd love to bring that skill set to develop the partner ecosystem even more in the future as well.

"Sales excellence combined with a robust and evolving partner strategy will be key to our success."