Welcome to the debut of our new podcast, a Q&A Discussion with IT Channel Executives. Our guest is Rachel Skaff, director of North American partner and channel sales at AWS.
After starting out as an award-winning engineer in heavy highway construction, Skaff pursued computer programming – and realized her skillset was better suited to solving customer problems than writing code. With roots in Enterprise IT, she still feels most comfortable in data centres, enabling companies to realize the value of innovative technologies from the edge to the cloud.
Before joining AWS, Skaff served as vice president and general manager U.S. sales enterprise, government, and next wave cloud providers at Intel Corp., overseeing . She led a US$5 billion sales and marketing organization with a focus on delivering end-to-end solutions that addressed real-world business problems across artificial intelligence, 5G, autonomous everything, IoT, HPC and security.
Prior to Intel, Skaff spent nearly a decade at PetSmart as vice president, IT global enterprise applications and engineering.
Topics discussed in the interview range from a deep dive into key announcements from AWS re:Invent 2022 in November and an update on the Amazon Partner Network to why and how she left the world of heavy construction to pursue a career in IT.