Pete Rawden
Career so far I have been with NetApp for the last 10 years and held sales leadership roles responsible for our partner, general territory and public sector businesses.
If you could be anyone else for a week, who would you be and what would you do? I would like to be the manager of Liverpool Football Club for the week that they complete the Premier League/UEFA Champions
League double. Final act of the week would be to call Sir Alex
and commiserate on United’s pending relegation.
What would you have as your last meal? Steak and chips with a large glass of red wine.
What is the best corporate jolly you have ever been on/taken partners on? NetApp hosts annual partner EBC visits to San Francisco. A beautiful city with so many things to do (wine tasting in Napa is tough to beat) and it’s a great opportunity to develop relationships with and between our partner executive community. The access to NetApp’s executive team and roadmaps are always well received and the sessions allow the partners to make long-term NetApp plans with confidence.
Do you see the cloud as a threat or an opportunity? This new model for IT consumption is a fantastic opportunity for NetApp and our partners. In an effort to lower cost and increase flexibility, enterprises today are increasingly evolving to a hybrid datacentre model that blends traditional in-house IT with application and infrastructure services delivered externally via the cloud.
Rather than become a service provider ourselves, NetApp chose to partner with service provision experts. Our service provider programme tightens the relationship between NetApp, best-of-breed service provider partners, and our value-added reseller (VAR) partners, enabling them to work together to more effectively help customers gain the cost savings, flexibility, and security of enterprise-class
cloud services.
Have any of your predictions come true this year? Yes. I predicted NetApp would take market share and outgrow our competitors, which we have. I also predicted Liverpool would win the Premier League and England would win the World Cup, which just shows you can’t be right all the time.
What do you see as the channel’s biggest challenge in 2011? The future is uncertain; however, two things remain constant for businesses and those are the change in business requirements and the need to control costs. The challenge for the channel is to guide end users to an infrastructure which is ready for whatever the future may bring, whilst at the same time delivering business efficiency.
What is the best part of your day? The first hour spent with my family and a strong cup of coffee before hitting the road.