With the recent promotion of CA Technologies Canada’s Jimmy Fulton, who’s now in a North Americas role, the company has also promoted David Ridout as its new Canadian country manager and vice-president of area sales.
Fulton, who served as the company’s vice-president and country manager in Canada for six years, was promoted last month to the vice-president of solution sales, mainframe at CA.
Ridout is no stranger to CA, having joined the team in 2008 as the company’s sales director in Western Canada. Prior to working at CA, Ridout was the vice-president of worldwide sales for WatchGuard Technologies, a network and content security solution vendor. His work experience also includes having been the vice-president of business development and marketing for Primus Knowledge Solutions.
CDN Now had the opportunity to speak with Ridout, who has only been in his new role since last month, to discuss his plans for the company in Canada and its cloud strategy.
Below is an edited transcript.
CDN Now: Congratulations on your promotion, David. You come to this role with a sales director background with CA. How will this help you lead the company’s Canadian operations?
David Ridout: We’ve got about 13,000 employees at CA and are a $4.5 billion company that’s growing year-over-year. We’re a large organization with several business units that are all focused on serving different types of customers and channel partners. It’s difficult for an outsider to come into CA to be able to leverage everything in the company effectively. I know the company very well. I was vice-president of worldwide sales at WatchGuard Technologies before this and was responsible for the entire company, which operated in 33 countries. Canada is a nice size business and will be enjoyable to run in my new role.
CDN Now: What are your plans for the cloud?
D.R.: CA has wholeheartedly embraced the cloud and almost all of our customers on the enterprise side are moving from virtualization to cloud environments, whether it’s being hosted themselves or by cloud providers. We have partners on the MSP and solution provider side that are helping their customers leverage cloud environments and services. At CA, we help companies manage, automate and secure their cloud environments. In the last 12 months, we’ve acquired many new technologies to help clients in the cloud space. We’re very focused on helping our channel partners and customers to build out whatever cloud environment they want. We’re also educating our partners on the different types of offerings they can provide to customers using cloud technologies.
CDN Now: What are your priorities for the business in Canada right now?
D.R.: My goal is to continue the strong revenue growth we’ve been seeing and I want to also expand our relationships with key customers. I’ll spend a lot of my time meeting local executives and executives across the country and will work to expand our channel relationships as well. We have five key solution areas at CA which will continue to be a focus for us: service automation, service assurance, virtualization management, service and portfolio management and security.
CDN Now: Is there anything you’d like to improve on at CA in Canada or with its channels?
D.R.: We’ll announce a new program for our channels for our fiscal 2012 year. We have an existing program right now, but the revised program will be announced within the next few weeks. We have some great channel partners here in Canada and I want to help them grow even more. I’m always interested in bringing new partners on board too.
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